The Book of Battles

TURNTHISTLE FARM

As he was sending them off the next morning, Arvad said, “I wish I could come!”

Austin turned to Ohean and said, “I don’t feel right about just leaving him.”

“I have responsibilities,” Arvad said. “I can’t just abandon the farm.”

Dissenbark frowned.

“It sounds like this is where I step off.”

Theone looked at her.

“You’ve got to go to the Temple,” she said. “I was wondering where I was in all of this. Well, Conn was called into this long ago. Austin and Anson can’t leave Ohean. Arvad can’t leave the farm. You can’t leave your duty, and I can’t bear to see Arvad stuck here alone. I’ll stay.”

“I almost want to stay,” Austin said. “I haven’t been to Nava in years, and didn’t relish my last trip.”

“And yet you will remain?” Conn said.

“I will,” Austin said.

“And now,” Conn announced in a tone different from his usual conversational voice, “I must speak. I must… It’s a blessing. And a prophecy.”

He took Arvad aside and said, “Soon, the one you have dreamed of will come, The heart inside of your heart, and when he does, you must recognize him. He will bear the same mark as your master. Love him. He will love you. Your souls have been together since before the beginning.”

They all looked at him and Dissenbark, coming out of the vardo with her belongings said, “He has grown into a true mage.”

“Indeed he has,” Ohean said. “And maybe by now I have grown into a true lover. For it is love more than anything else that will heal all things in the end.”

“Anson?”

“You must understand he is mine, Dissen,” Ohean said. “That in this life because of many things we have often been separated and the worse for it, but that we have been together for many lives, in many times, in many places, and from now on we will not be separated.”

Anson’s grey blue eyes shone while Ohean said this, and beside him, Theone, remembering her own lost love said,   “Then you have to love him. Never stop loving him.”

But Arvad looked at Conn and said, “I am no great mage. I cannot prophecy, but I can advise. If my heart is coming, then I see yours has already come.”

“Yes,” Conn said. “Like Ohean and Anson, we have also had to be parted many times.”

“Well, next time,” Arvad said, “Don’t let him go. Don’t ever let him go.”

ZAHEM

THE CITY OF NAVA

Mehta woke early the next morning, and then, remembering where she was, in a hotel, in a great city, willed herself back to sleep. There was no breakfast to cook, no fire to make ready, no Arvad to wake up and say milk the cows. She slept. Usually when she went to bed she was so exhausted she closed her eyes and then woke up with a sore back the next morning, but this morning sleep was a soft cloud she sank into, and coming slowly up from it, she sank into it again.

When she finally woke in truth, she was thinking of closing the curtains that let the light in, but Mehta decided it must be time to get out of bed and so, with a great will, she made herself rise and walk across the room. Here there was an indoor bathroom, which they had at the farm house sure enough, but that one Mehta had spent a long time coaxing Farmer Soren to put in.

When she had washed her face and combed out her hair, she knew it was time to begin the serious work of finding a morning cup of coffee. She would wake Master Soren next door. In a frock, with her keys and her marmalade hair tied back, she left the room and banged on the door three times.

“Ah,” he opened the door in only his under trousers, holding his head.

“For the love of…. Ah, Sweet Banthra! Kavana and Nar! Don’t you sleep, woman?” he rasped as she came into his room, which smelled of tobacco.

“I did sleep. I slept too long.”

“Sleep longer.”

“What time is it?”

“Scarecly nine!”

“Well, how long do you need?” she demanded.

“We were up all night. You were with me. You put away more Solandake than I ever could, and here you are… Gods curse you, witch!”

“I thought you’d want to get a good cup of coffee so we could start the day.”

As Soren stumbled to the bathroom and shut the heavy door, he muttered, “Goddamn you, woman…” and a few other choice epithets before he came back, the sound of a flushing toilet behind him.

“Look!” his hair was sticking up and, as usual, the black band was on his wrist, “I’m going to sleep another half hour, and—”

“I want a cup of coffee.”

“Then as my servant I urge you to send to the kitchen for coffee, then serve yourself and bring me a cup. How’s that?”

Soren tumbled back into bed, his bare back to her, “and if service is as slow here as it was last time, that should be a half hour. I’ll see you then.”

“Master Soren!”

“That’s final,” he made a loud snoring noise. “See, I’m snoring.” He snored again. “Now go.”

Soren persisted in his rude snoring, and then finally Mehta, knowing when she had lost, shrugged and went out of the room.

    

He was right enough. It had taken the better part of a half hour, and when she came up he was more or less awake. She mixed a cup of coffee from the service and said, as she handed it to him, “The price of beans is going up, I hear. There’s a war down south past Solahn.”

Soren cheered her with a raised coffee cup, and then rolled over in bed, drinking his coffee there.

“You think I talk so much and talk about nothing.”

“That’s not so, Mehta.”

“It is,” she said, smiling. “It is a little. Maybe you’re right,” she shrugged.

“I think,” she sat in the large rocking chair by the door, “I’ve been obsessed with you finding a wife so that I would be free to find a husband.”

“You can find a husband anytime you want.”

“I’ve convinced myself it woudn’t be right to leave you.”

She put up a hand before he could continue.

“This is foolish because I don’t leave the house enough to find anyone. And maybe, deep inside, I don’t want to. Like you don’t want to.”

Soren stirred from bed and said, “Now, you’ve lost me.”

“I know, and you know I know, that you like your bachelor’s life. It’s enough lonely farm widows, young ladies, for you to run out and spend the night with, strange girls who blow in that come up to you giggling. Like that silly one last night I was afraid I’d stumble into this morning.”

Soren lifted his finger.

“And,” she said before he could speak, “there’s nothing wrong with pleasure. But I need to stop trying to make you the marrying type to justify why I won’t go and find myself some pleasure of my own.”

“I did love someone,” Soren said. “Once.”

Metha blinked.

He nodded.

“I loved her and I’m not likely to see her again, or be able to get to her. If she still lives. There… There was so much life in her I can’t imagine her dead, but I also can’t imagine her still in the place we were and…”

Mehta had put her coffee down and was looking at him intently. Soren was her best friend. She loved him. They had found each other and together made the farm.

“She’s from that old time,” Mehta said. “The time you hate to talk about.”

Soren nodded soberly.

“She was the good thing about it. She came into my life and let me know how little my life was. She made me human. I loved her. She loved me. We would have had a child together.”

This was one of the rare moments when Soren was not jolly and light. His face looked full of an old sadness when he turned it to the window, and Mehta said:

“Well, we’ll not talk of it. We’ll put it away and if one day you want to take it out, I’ll be here. All right?”

Soren nodded.

 

“Well, now what about these?” Mehta said, lifting up a bolt of light blue silk. “See how they catch the sun?”

Soren frowned at her and said, “What on earth would we do with that back at Turnthistle?”

“Well, I was just thinking it was pretty was all,” she laid the bolt down gently. “I’m getting this bracelet by the way. It’s all the way from Crozad—”

But she stopped then, because there was a drumming. A bum, bum, bum, bum.

“What the?” she began, but Soren was looking toward the sound of the drums and with the bag of feed he crossed the busy walkway that looked down over the low city. Regretfully Mehta glanced at the bolt of silk, then surrendered it and joined him.

The main street was cleared, and at the head of a great procession came large men beating slowly, bum, bum, bum, tympanis, beating like a dying gian’s heart, and behind them ranks and ranks of them, all in black, came the Hands, walking, not horsed. And then, lastly, there were men on horses, in black robes and in the midst of them, his hood down, his salt white face scanning all, Phineas, the High Priest. Above him was a banner, held aloft by servants. And this was the Black Star.

All noise in the city died. The procession made a turn now, into Temple Circle, and Mehta watched as the great doors, or what she could see of them, not blocked by other buildings, slowly swung open. Now the men were disappearing into it. One by one. Who knows how long the procession went on? When the drummers had been swallowed there was only complete silence.

The Temple was a long, structure. Long and low, but high at the same time because of its many spires. As many times as Mehta had come to the city, as much as the city was dominated by the Temple, somehow she had never looked at it. It had a way of resisting serious looking. It was surrounded by three courts called the Circle, and there was a wide space between it and the rest of the city. Now, suddenly, from each of the brass spires a white banner with a Black Star came up, and breaking across the city was a new sound, a trumpet from the highest tower, long and low and strangely chilling.

Soren turned back to Mehta and said, “Put it out of your heart. Let’s ignore all of this and continue with our shopping, eh?”

THE MOST HOLY PROPHET

DAHLAN

 

In a small dining room overlooking the Temple precincts, the Fifty-First Prophet, blessed be his name, Dahlan, aged sixteen, was drumming his fingers on the worn table top.

“I feel like a prisoner and not like a ruler,” he declared to his councilors.

These days they avoided the great dining hall and the most lavish parts of the palace. Beyond them in the little kitchen, the Mother of the Prophet had made herself useful by cooking, for it made her less of a threat to the men and relieved her nerves and beside the Prophet, Elder Allman scowled and said, “You feel like this because it is precisely what you are.”

“We have not had time to gather enough faithful men,” Erek Skabelund said.

“Faithfulness is not the problem,” said Allman. “We have not had time to gather powerful men.”

“You sent your wives away?” Dahlan said.

Allman only nodded sharply, but Skabelund said, “Mareesa headed out on a wagon train the other day.”

“Where did you send her?”

“To her family’s home in the east.”

“I wonder,” Dahlan said, steepling his fingertips, “if you should have sent her further.”

Aimee Kimball, her blond hair tied back in a severe bun, came to the table and placed a dish of eggs, mushrooms and spinach before her son.

“Eat,” she said. “Right will win out.”

“I would not be the first head of a state, especially the religious head,” Dahlan said, “to be driven out of his home, and there is no doubt Phineas has taken over everything. No, Mother, it is not right but might that wins.”

He looked down at the plate. He lifted his fork.

“Mother, it looks delicious, but right now I can’t. I need to be to the garden.”

Aimee nodded.

 “Well, then take this to Sariah when you go.”

 

The palace was a mighty complex and much of it was shared between the High Priest and the Prophet, but in the councils of the last several months, the Prophet had been put down every time, and it was only in the last month, filled with rage, almost punching a hole in his wall, that Dahlan had to admit he had no power, his people had sold him out, and in this generation the Prophet would be the puppet and the Priest the authority.

It was Allman who had spoken first.

“There is something not right about Phineas.”

“Yes, I agree,” Dahlan had said, wearily.

“No, I mean he and the Black Hands… They do not serve God. At least, they do not serve ours.”

“They serve us, and they serve the Daumans,” Dahlan said. “How can that be?”

“They serve themselves,” Allman said.

Erek had said it more plainly, “Allman believes they are working witchcraft.”

Witchcraft! It was the Royan who were expert in it. It was an offence to God, one of the things which the Zahem could not reconcile themselves to their dark skinned neighbors for, and yet, the very High Priest?

“That Temple belonged to another one once,” Skabelund said. “It was believed that we purified it, made it holy for the worship of our God. And yet, rather than consecrating it to Heavenly Father, we ought to have destroyed it.”

“Do you think they would have let us?” Allman said. He shook his head. “No, I believe the priesthood was always dedicated to those old gods, and the way they continued was to join their religion to ours as they joined their troops to the Daumans.”

“And now?” Dahlan said.

“And now all pretense will be dropped,” Allman said. “Now they will worship their demons openly and drag all of us to hell with them.”

 

“What will we do?” Sariah asked. She sat beside Dahlan and, sensibly, forked a mushroom and a bit of scrambled egg and then popped it into her mouth.

“I should stand by my people.”

“We should flee,” Sariah said, simply.

Dahlan blinked at her.

“Princess Maud told us all of these things when she visited, but we didn’t trust her, thought her a witch and a heathen with her heart in the wrong place, but little knowledge. She was seeking the man she loved and said he could tell us more. Now she is safely back in Chyr, and it turns out we are th fools with little knowledge. If Phineas is a sorcerer, and it appears that he is, then we should flee as soon as possible to wherever we can. You’re no good to your people dead.”

Sariah kept eating, and above them, from the crown of the Temple, the drums beat, boom boom boom.

And when we return, the conclusion of The Book of Battles