The Last Banquet (Bell Mountain) Read online

  But for Jack there was only Van to come back to, and he wasn’t looking forward to that. He hadn’t once missed Van, and he was sure Van hadn’t missed him. On the whole, he’d rather go back to Obann where Obst was and Helki.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Ellayne said. “Cheer up! Do you think you’re going to go back to that old pill of a carter, after what we’ve done? Don’t you know we’re going to be famous? More famous than Abombalbap!”

  Jack didn’t even know what “famous” meant. There weren’t any famous people in Ninneburky. He was just the carter’s stepson. He and Ellayne had carried out the mission God had given them, and now it was over.

  “First thing,” Ellayne said, “you’re going to come and live with us. Once I tell him about you, my father will want you to. Martis can live with us, too, if he wants.”

  “And what about Chillith?” Jack said. “Won’t it get kind of crowded in your house?”

  “No—not Chillith. Martis can figure out what to do with him.”

  Hard on Chillith, Jack thought. But then the whole business was just silly.

  “I’m not going to let you be unhappy, Jack.”

  “I’ll be unhappy if I want to.”

  “You’ll see what a fool you are, when they have a parade for us.”

  Jack didn’t bother to answer.

  Martis hurried them along, and by noon the next day they were under the eaves of Oziah’s Wood. It was mostly oak trees, and all their leaves were gold. Jays greeted the travelers with raucous music. Helki would have said they were complaining.

  “We have woods like this in my country,” Chillith said. “I remember the smell of them, and the birds sound just the same. But I’ll never see any of it.”

  “You have to trust in God,” Ellayne said. “You’ve been a bad man, Chillith. God could’ve struck you dead, but He didn’t. And that makes me wonder if He’s saving you for something else. Something important. You may be blind, but you’re not dead.”

  “The blind man is rebuked by children,” Chillith said. Ellayne wanted to say she was sorry, that she hadn’t said it to be mean; but something made her hold her peace. Even so, she believed in what she’d said. Hadn’t God sent her and Jack up to the top of Bell Mountain? And to all kinds of other places she never would have dreamed of going to. Why shouldn’t God do things like that with Chillith?

  “Someday, Chillith, I’ll tell you the story of my life,” Martis said. “Whatever you’ve done, I’ve done worse. I didn’t believe in God for most of my life; but now I know I never take a breath without Him. That’s how I live.”

  “When didn’t you believe in God?” Jack asked.

  Martis smiled. “When I was a servant of the Temple!”

  There were paths all throughout Oziah’s Wood, some of them nearly as wide and well-traveled as country lanes. Hunters, trappers, and loggers used them. Martis stuck to a beaten path that led toward the center of the forest. When the day drew to a close, they made camp on it.

  They’d just gotten their fire going when two buckskin-clad woodsmen came up the path from the opposite direction. Martis waved to them.

  “Come and sit with us,” he said, “and tell us the news of the wood.”

  “We will, once you tell us who you are and what you’re doing here,” said the elder of the two men, a greybeard.

  “Not much to tell,” said Martis. “There’s a war on, and we’ve come here to get away from it. We’re from Caristun. My name is Martis, and these are my grandsons, Jack and Layne.” They kept Ellayne’s bright blond hair cut short and said she was a boy. It was safer that way: Jack and Ellayne had come to that conclusion themselves long before they’d met Martis.

  “What about him?” said the younger woodsman, clean-shaven. “He looks like a Griff to me.” The hair on Chillith’s head was growing back.

  “He is,” Martis answered, “but there’s no harm in him. God has stricken him blind, so we’ve been taking care of him. His name is Chillith.”

  The two strangers exchanged a look. “You won’t mind if we’re careful about this,” the older man said. “All of us here in Oziah’s Wood have sworn an oath together to keep the enemy out. If any Heathen do get in, we make sure they don’t get out again. My name is Bibb, and this is Deffit. We’re scouting for a band of rangers camped not far from here.”

  They sat down by the fire, declining offers of food. They had plenty of their own, they said, without borrowing from travelers. The wood fed them in abundance.

  “We caught a Heathen rider, just the other day,” Bibb said, “but we can’t get any sense out of him. He doesn’t understand our language, and we don’t know what he is—not a Griff, not a Wallekki, nor any kind of Heathen we’ve ever seen before. We’d string him up, but first we’d like to know what he was doing here.”

  “I speak Wallekki,” Martis said. “I might be able to get something out of him, if he speaks it, too.”

  “I speak many of the languages of the East,” Chillith said.

  “Well, then, that’s a piece of luck for us,” Deffit said. “We won’t ask you to break camp, after you’ve been hiking all day and you’re all settled down for the night. But tomorrow morning you can pay us a visit.”

  “We’ll be happy to,” Martis said.

  “Good!” Bibb said. He got up again. “Just keep to this path, and we’ll meet you and guide you to our camp. Some of our lads will be on patrol during the night, so you and your kids can feel safe. We’ll go on ahead now and tell our friends about you. Come on, Deffit.”

  After the rangers left, Chillith said, “They’ll probably want to hang me, too, along with their prisoner.”

  “We won’t let them,” Martis said.

  “And anyhow, they’re not like that!” Ellayne said. “My brother is a logging foreman, and he comes here all the time. So I ought to know.”

  Chillith shrugged. “War is war,” he said.

  They spent a peaceful night. In the morning Bibb met them on the trail and led them up a side path.

  Ten rangers had a camp in a clearing by a little brook, living in tiny makeshift cabins. A few deerskins were stretched on frames to dry. A couple of donkeys and a horse were tethered to a line between two trees. Ham, the donkey that Jack and Ellayne had taken from a tinker who’d tried to sell them into slavery, brayed a greeting to the other donkeys.

  Somewhere nearby, Jack and Ellayne knew, Wytt was watching over them from a hiding place in the underbrush. It was a good thing, Jack thought, that the rangers didn’t have a dog.

  The men, having been told to expect visitors, were all waiting for them and for news of the outside world. Sitting on the ground with his wrists and ankles bound was the prisoner, silent and impassive. Bibb introduced the newcomers.

  “We have trappers’ tea, if you’d like a cup,” he said. “And then we can get down to business.”

  It was good to be here, Jack thought, as he sipped his tea—better than home. Maybe when the war was over, he’d become a ranger. It was good to hear men talking who sounded like they’d grown up in Ninneburky, and a few of them probably had.

  “Are you ready to try to talk to the prisoner?” Deffit said, after they had all had tea. “I don’t think he’s in a chatty mood; but then he never is.”

  “If I could see him, I would know what he is,” Chillith said. “Men of many nations have come west over the mountains. He must belong to one of them. Take us to him.”

  Martis and Deffit led him to the prisoner, Jack and Ellayne following with the rangers. The prisoner glared up at them. He was a small man, dark and wiry. Chillith sat down in front of him.

  He tried several languages, and then one of them turned out to be right, and the prisoner replied. They exchanged some words together.

  “He is of the Shoto people,” Chillith said, “from the western shores of the Great Lakes. His name is Arvaush.”

  “Ask him what he was doing in the wood,” Bibb said.

  Chillith asked and got an answer. Then
their talk became more lively—back and forth at first, but soon the prisoner was doing all the talking, and Chillith all the listening. The Griff sat as motionless as a stone, taking it all in.

  Sweat began to show on his face. The muscles around his jaws clenched themselves. The rangers grew impatient.

  “For heaven’s sake, what is it?” Deffit cried. “What’s he telling you? Out with it, man!”

  Chillith seemed not to hear him. Martis knelt beside him and grasped his shoulder. The Griff flinched, then turned to him, wide-eyed even in his blindness.

  “Martis! The boy’s dream—it was even exactly as he dreamed it—”

  “Tell us what the man was saying, Chillith.”

  Chillith shuddered. He licked his lips, which had gone dry.

  “This man, Arvaush, was at the siege of Obann,” he said. “The Thunder King’s army is no more, even as Jack dreamed it the night I was struck blind. This man saw everything. A monster like a walking mountain came out of the river and destroyed the army. Thousands were killed, and thousands more scattered in all directions. Arvaush was bringing the news eastward, and he entered this forest as a shortcut.

  “The city stands. It is a miracle! Our troops were in the city, thousands of them. They opened the gates to the army. They burned the great Temple of the Obann God. And yet the city stands, and the great army is no more.”

  He stopped to take deep breaths. His face had gone deathly pale. Around him the rangers stood as men transfixed.

  “What do you mean, they burned the Temple?” Martis said.

  “The rulers of the Temple let our warriors in by secret passages: that was how they got into the city. That was the plan. To create panic in the city, they set fire to the Temple. Then they opened some of the city’s gates from the inside. Warriors came storming in. The city should have fallen. But the great beast came out of the river and made the army mad with fear. It had a boy riding on its back—at least that’s what Arvaush thinks he saw. Warriors slew each other by the thousands, trying to escape.”

  “Wait!” Martis cried. He looked as though he was going to faint, Ellayne thought. “The rulers of the Temple let the Heathen in? Is that what you said?”

  “Arvaush says so,” Chillith answered. “And a week ago he overtook a coach traveling east, protected by riders under the command of a mardar. In that coach was a passenger. Arvaush saw him: an old man, fat and white-haired, with a wrinkled face. It was the First Prester of Obann—the mardar said so. They were taking him to Kara Karram, where the Thunder King has built a new Temple. It’s been many years in the building and is finished now. Maybe the old man is to be First Prester there and a servant of the Thunder King. That would be his reward for betraying the city.”

  The rangers stared at each other, speechless. Jack and Ellayne stared at each other, too. Many times had Martis told them that the First Prester was a wicked man. Ellayne had never quite believed it. After all, the First Prester—the holiest of all God’s servants in Obann—how could it be?

  “Tell us the rest,” Martis said.

  Chillith wiped his face with both hands and spoke to Arvaush. The prisoner answered: he would have waved his hands in sweeping gestures, had his wrists not been tied together. When he’d finished, Chillith translated.

  “He says the fire in the city, where the Temple burned, rose all the way to heaven. But when he looked again from a hilltop some miles distance, a heavy rain was falling and the fire had gone out. The city was saved. Arvaush heard from other fugitives that the Temple was completely destroyed, but that the fire hadn’t spread to the rest of the city.

  “That’s all he knows. All he wants now is to go home, and never come again to Obann. He believes the Obann God has cursed the Thunder King. He’s very much afraid.”

  Silence fell over the rangers’ camp. At last Bibb said, “These are the worst tidings that were ever heard in my time. No Temple! What shall we do? It’s not the Heathen that God has cursed, but us.”

  The men murmured their agreement. Martis stood up, steadied himself with a hand on Chillith’s shoulder. The Griff sat with his head bowed, as one who mourns.

  “There’s no call to lose heart, friends,” Martis said. “There may not be a Temple anymore, but God has saved the city, and He has true servants everywhere—never more than now. Obann the city has survived, and the enemy is broken. You’ll be hearing from God’s servants, and they will know what to say to you. But I know now.”

  He looked beaten, Jack thought, like he was when they’d led him down from the summit of Bell Mountain.

  Ellayne squeezed Jack’s hand. “I wish Obst were here!” she said. “He’d know what to say.”

  Jack wanted to tell these men that it wasn’t as bad as it looked, not by a long shot, that they’d found missing books of Scripture, written by King Ozias in his own hand. But it was too much to tell at this time. Maybe later.

  “Gentlemen,” said Martis, “we have given you this prisoner’s tidings. I would recommend you don’t hang him. But for the time being, I want to be left alone—except for Chillith.” He prodded the Griff’s shoulder. “Come, friend. I need you.”

  Puzzled, Chillith let Martis help him up and lead him away. Jack and Ellayne tried to follow, but Martis didn’t let them.

  “Not now,” he said.

  He and Chillith passed out of sight of the camp. “Let them go,” said Bibb, “and God have mercy on our country! How are we to live without the Temple?”

  No one answered. No one knew.

  Out of sight and earshot of the camp, Martis told Chillith the story of his life: how Lord Reesh took him in, a young cutpurse from the streets, taught him to read and write, made him an assassin in his service and the Temple’s, how he committed murder, suborned and corrupted witnesses—anything the First Prester asked of him, he did.

  “It was for the greater good, always,” he said. “I let my master decide what that greater good was, and did whatever he required of me. It was all for the Temple, and the Temple was everything. And then he sent me to Bell Mountain.”

  Chillith interrupted. “Your grandson, Layne, is a girl,” he said. “I don’t suppose either of them is your grandson, or any natural kin of yours.”

  It took Martis a moment to recover from surprise. “How do you know that?” he said.

  “I know. It’s clear to me now. You’ve never had a wife, never any children of your own. You have no family, Martis. All you ever had was the Temple.”

  “It’s true,” Martis said. “If any man could be called my father, it would be Lord Reesh. He was my master, the First Prester: the servant of God, God’s steward, the keeper of the Temple. And he destroyed the Temple. All those terrible things we did, he and I, all in the service of the Temple—and all for nothing. He has betrayed the Temple.”

  “You loved him very much,” Chillith said. Those words were like an arrow coming out of nowhere to slam quivering into the target. Martis flinched.

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s true, too. I did love him. I never thought of it, but I suppose I did. But hear the rest of my story, while I have the nerve to tell it.”

  He told Chillith how the First Prester had sent him to find the children who were going to Bell Mountain, to follow them up the mountain and stop them from ringing the bell, if indeed the bell was there. He was to kill them, if that was the only way to stop them. Otherwise he was to capture them and take them back to Lord Reesh, where they would be murdered when the First Prester had finished with them.

  “But I couldn’t complete my mission,” he said. “God laid His hand on me. I was given a reprieve. And yet God’s noose is around my neck, and I am conscious of His mercy every day. I protect those two children now and would give my life for them. That’s what my new master requires of me.”

  Chillith tried to see him, but of course he couldn’t.

  “So they rang the bell, those two—the bell that was heard in all the countries of the East,” he said. “No man knew what it was or what it meant.
The Thunder King’s mardars forbade anyone to speak of it.”

  “God’s bell,” Martis said. “Ozias put it there, so that God would hear it someday. And I believe He has. The world is changing.”

  “And meanwhile the Thunder King has given your old master a new Temple,” Chillith said.

  “So it seems!” Martis clenched his fists. “I want to follow Reesh there, to his new Temple,” he said, “and there, to his face, perform my last act as an assassin. Let him be destroyed by the weapon he himself made.”

  They sat in silence for a little while.

  “Why have you told me all these things?” Chillith asked.

  “Because the hand of God is on you, as it is on me.”

  “If you go to Kara Karram, how will you protect the children?”

  “Drop them off at Ninneburky, where they belong, and go on without them,” Martis said. “Alone, if I have to. But I thought you might come with me.”

  Chillith smiled, and this time there was warmth in it.

  “I will,” he said. “Do you remember when we first met, and I said we might be friends, were it not my duty to put you to death? There was always something that drew me to you, as a friend. We shall go to Kara Karram as brothers, you and I. Probably the Thunder King will kill us both.”

  They shared a quiet laugh over that.

  “Tell me one thing, though,” Martis said. “Do you still believe the Thunder King to be a god?”

  Chillith shrugged. “If he is,” he said, “he is an evil god, and the world would be a better place without him.

  “The God of Obann performed a miracle to save His city. He let the Temple be destroyed because it was rotten at its heart and served itself, not Him. He made me blind; but here in the country of my enemies He has raised up friends and protection for me. It shames me now that I ever served the Thunder King. Your God now shall be my God.”

  CHAPTER 14

  The Blays in Battle