The Ring Оf Fire. The Wolf Bell

SEVEN

Burgdeeth did not talk of war at first, but then people began to whisper. Even when Zephy had slipped into the Set with food for Thorn, her danger had not seemed so great, her possible discovery so shattering, with the thought of real danger raw in her mind. And she could tell Mama was worried and upset. Though in spite of it, Mama was as friendly with Kearb-Mattus as ever.

No one ever expected war, she guessed. Certainly the men of Urobb hadn’t expected it as they spread their nets; how could they know they would be dead in the morning? Everything we do is hinged on war, she thought. If we’re not attacked; if there’s no war in Cloffi; if life goes on at all.

Would the prayers at Fire Scourge help? Could they help, as the Covenants taught? Would the gods intervene? Zephy didn’t know, she felt she didn’t know anything. But Fire Scourge, the most dramatic supplication of the year, when the cut fields were lit with the long line of torches and the gods propitiated with fire, would such a strong supplication help Cloffi?

The volcanoes had stopped war twice in Ere’s history. But then it was the sacred cities themselves that had been attacked; no wonder the fires spilled forth.

Do I believe that? She thought suddenly. Do I really believe the gods made the volcanoes erupt to stop the attacks on their cities? Do I believe the gods can do such a thing?

If the gods are real, why do they let war come at all? And why did they let their own cities be attacked in the first place?

After Fire Scourge the fields would lie black and burned-smelling until the snows came to cover them. She felt so unsettled—as if life were taking a turning she could not prevent, nor yet hurry, and the waiting was unbearable; yet the finality would be worse. She remained edgy and cross even when she and Meatha managed to slip into Tra. Hoppa’s kitchen. All three felt too oppressed by the fate of Urobb to have lessons. Tra. Hoppa looked very tired.

Meatha clung to the old lady, fearful and wan. “It makes you feel so trapped, Tra. Hoppa. How could we escape, really? If the attack comes so suddenly, from all sides, the way it did in Urobb . . .”

“You could go to the mountain,” Tra. Hoppa said sternly. “You don’t think they’d search all the caves. Those mountains are honeycombed with caves.”

“But you—”

“Never mind about me. I’m a wily old thing. And if you can’t get to the caves, slip into the tunnel until you can get away.” She grinned at them. “You two can outsmart a few clumsy Kubalese soldiers if you keep your wits about you. Though we may be in for some difficult times. If Urobb had had the strength and determination of Carriol, Kubal would never have attacked her. Nor would Kubal threaten Cloffi now, if Cloffi were strong. But strength can only begin inside, with its people, and with Cloffi as she is now . . .”

“How could anything ever begin with Cloffi’s people?” Meatha said bitterly.

“It would take those who truly cared.”

“No one cares!”

It won’t happen, Zephy thought desperately. War can’t happen to us. The light from the window cut across Tra. Hoppa’s gray hair and made her wrinkles, as she turned, show plainly. It was strange to think of Tra. Hoppa as old, for she was nothing like the old ladies of Burgdeeth. It was as if all Tra. Hoppa’s life lay in stages there inside, still to be seen and touched. The other old women of Burgdeeth seemed to have retained nothing of their pasts but the bitterness.

When they left Tra. Hoppa, it was quickly, for the Horse had begun to drill on the road beyond the grove. Such a drill outside the Set was most unusual. “I suppose the Landmaster has taken some heed of the defeat of Urobb,” Tra. Hoppa said bitterly. “At least the Horse is doing more than their usual playful sparring. You must go by the tunnel, they can see all over the housegardens from that road.”

The tunnel was as old as Burgdeeth. It began in the plum grove where the old prison had stood, and ended beneath the sacred statue. It had been the means of escape for the Children of Ynell who had, as slaves, built much of the original town of Burgdeeth. They had dug the tunnel secretly at night and, when they cast and erected the statue, had made a hollow opening in its base to join the tunnel opening. Only Tra. Hoppa knew of the tunnel, and she had learned of it in Carriol: the secret had been well kept from the landmasters of Burgdeeth. “It will be wanted one day,” she had said once, “as it was wanted before. It might be needed several times before Burgdeeth is free.”

Tra. Hoppa had them out the door before they could catch their breaths, the candle flame nearly invisible in the daylight. “Quick, Zephy, pivot the stone back. Hurry!”

The stone, a small pivoting boulder surrounded by humped gray rocks, moved with the pressure of Zephy’s shoulder. The tunnel would lead them, as it had those others, beneath Burgdeeth into the hollow base of the statue. When darkness had come, those Children had pushed back the bronze panel and fled Burgdeeth forever. Now Zephy and Meatha slipped down into darkness as, above them, Tra. Hoppa shouldered the stone back into place.

Beyond the light that the candle threw on dirt-mortared walls, the tunnel was utterly black. It smelled damp. They could just see the first supporting timber, a thick tree trunk sunk between the stones.

The weight of the earth above them seemed to press down intolerably as they made their way in the darkness, the candlelight dodging and shifting.

“I never liked it,” Meatha whispered.

“It’s better than getting caught.”

Why did they whisper? The tunnel made them do it. As if, if they spoke aloud, they might—what? Stir awake something alive in the tunnel walls themselves? Zephy snorted at herself and tried to concentrate on the little sphere of candlelight as Meatha pressed close behind, bumping her now and then in her impatience to get on.

The ceiling curved down into the walls, making the head room higher in the middle; but too low, still, to be pleasant. The candle guttered once, as if a breath had touched it—maybe Zephy’s own, though. Then it steadied, picking out the niche where the relics of Owdneet had once lain. The niche was empty, of course; they had long since ceased to explore it. But now suddenly Zephy wanted to reach in. She held the light up and felt into the hollow. The first Children of Ynell had put their hands in just so, had felt the rough dirt walls, had . . . she found herself scraping and working at something, some protrusion in the hard dirt . . . something smooth . . . something . . . It came away suddenly and fell into her hand, so heavy she dropped it. She fished it out and held it to the light.

It was a bit of green stone as long as her finger, sharp-pointed at one end and rounded at the other, with jagged sides. It looked like jade. On the round end were carvings—runes! The girls stood staring. The stone gleamed, stirring Zephy in a way she could not understand. It looked as if perhaps it had been part of a round and much larger stone that had somehow shattered. It had been completely buried in the dirt of the niche, though now it seemed to be shining more brightly, as if . . . Zephy looked up toward the end of the tunnel, where a cold light burned suddenly . . .

Where no light should have been!

The light reflected on the green stone: a light where a moment before there had been only blackness, a light that was growing brighter still, had grown into a brilliance so penetrating Zephy could hardly look. The tunnel walls had disappeared; the light glowed in an immense space ahead of them, an unbounded space.

They stepped forward into the vastness with no thought that they should not.

It was like a cavern of light, a cavern without walls, if such a thing could be imagined. The space seemed to cant and tilt to create the feeling of walls across the emptiness. There was no sound, no stir of air.

Then gradually they became aware of something else.

The space seemed to be expanding. It was growing lighter and rising; it was luminous, as if mists drifted; and though there was no color, all colors seemed to swirl around them as if colors had voices that could penetrate the soul. The spaces pulled at them, beckoned to them until at last Zephy thought she could see far distant walls. Then she realized they were mountains, mountains rising in a space that was larger than the world she knew, larger than the sky, as if the sky had swelled suddenly higher and everything was farther off. The sense of light behind the mists was of a terrible brilliance; she could feel the shadows moving, and yet they were not shadows, they were . . . Oh! the figures moving toward them had great, spreading wings; figures that hovered above them, around them—half-horse, half-man, with shining wings. You are come, they seemed to whisper, and laughed with voices filled with joy. You must reach out, you will reach outward—if you are the chosen, you must extend yourselves, you three—and three—and more. You will reach out . . .

Then they were gone; there was only blackness; and Zephy had dropped the stone.

If she found it and picked it up, the vision would return, and she wanted that desperately—yet she trembled with fear as she knelt and began to feel for the stone in the darkness. The candle, its light strangely snuffed, lay abandoned.

After a long while she had almost given up. Had the stone rolled completely away? She was frantic to find it now; then when she did at last, it was far from where it had fallen. She touched it and light flared around her so she drew her hand away as if it had been burned. She longed for the vision—and she was terrified of it.

Finally she took the stone up in her handkerchief. Again she was surprised at its weight She felt along the wall for the niche and laid it quickly inside.

Meatha said nothing. If she wanted the vision to return, she did not ask for it. They groped ahead, the walls pressing close around them; they did not talk, the vision still held them utterly. They were quenched with it, as if one moment of wonder, of such brilliance, was all they could manage without blinding themselves. It encompassed them completely.

When they reached the lighter hollow beneath the statue, Zephy felt she had come back from an infinite distance. Tiny points of light like little stars shone through the peepholes in the bronze base of the statue. Zephy peered out on one side, Meatha on the other, but they were reluctant to go. They stood silently holding the vision, yearning for it, nearly turning back into the tunnel. What had Zephy held; what was the stone? Had they seen a vision, or had they touched a reality they could not comprehend?

At last Meatha pushed open the bronze door in the base, and they slipped through. Voices brought them up short; they pushed the door back under cover of their bodies then knelt hastily before the statue, their arms crossed over their chests in servility, heads bowed, as two men came across the square.

Zephy stared at the ground and moved her lips in prayer. The shadow of a hoof cut across her hand as if the Luff’Eresi touched her in benediction; and it was in true prayer that she knelt, for she had stood on the brink of a world whose dimensions made her own world flat and colorless, a world outside of everything she knew, where the gods had drifted the way sunlight drifts through water—yet had been real beyond anything she had ever known.

When at last they rose to go, they walked close together, shivering. And once they looked back at the bronze Luff’Eresi sweeping above the square with his consorts leaping beside him. I have seen them, Zephy thought. I have seen the true gods. Then she thought suddenly, numb with surprise, and frightened: I am like Ynell. I, too, am a Child of Ynell.

For days afterward she would wake in the darkness of the loft knowing this and feeling terrified. Then she would come fully awake and remember the vision vividly, would lie staring out at the changing sky and seeing that other world instead. Ephemeral as gauze it had been, yet as real as stone. I am like Ynell, she would think again, amazed. I am a Child of Ynell.

Then one morning two small boys were drowned, and everything else was driven from Zephy’s head.

An older boy found them and ran at once to the Deacons. The two little bodies had been washed onto the bank of the river, and were mud-covered and icy cold. Zephy did not run with the crowd to see, and when she heard how the children had looked, she was glad she hadn’t. The horror of the ceremonial viewing was quite enough to turn her sick; sick at the deaths, sick with a fear she could not even name. And one of the boys was little Graged Orden. She and Meatha could only think of the game of search-and-seek and of the barrel with the red rag hidden and little Graged Orden running from Kearb-Mattus in terror. They sat together in Temple while the red robed Deacons said the Prayers and Covenants and the Ritual Mournings and held the burning chalice above the little coffins; while the citizens of Cloffi bent, one by one, before the coffins with their hands crossed over their shoulders and their heads lowered in submission to the will of the Luff’Eresi.

The coffins would be placed in the burial wall and covered with sacred mortar and stone. This funeral, so soon after Nia’s, was horrible.

Late on the night of the funeral, Zephy heard hoofbeats in the street, but when she rose to look there was nothing. She sat in the window for a long time, the fear of death clinging to her.