Raven's Warrior (24 page)
Before assigning his seal, he examined carefully his first official decree since the death of his son, and was well satisfied. The minister had written a summons to physicians, wise men, and magicians from all over the empire, to come to the capital and try to find some remedy.
The official proclamation was sent out across the entire kingdom. It went out over the land like the smoke of the many funeral pyres and touched the furthest corners of the realm.
Guided patiently by Mah Lin, over time and through great effort, I grew more skilled with the handling of two blades. Under the discerning eye of his loving daughter, I made headway unraveling the mysteries of the written word. Step by step, proceeding in an orderly fashion, my body and my education flourished. I grew by leaps and bounds, for no man eats like one who has known starvation.
Selah and Mah Lin told me of monks who traveled to far off places, and yet in body never left the quietness of cave or cloister. For these masters, time and distance were not an obstacle nor were they now for me. While my flesh sat at the oaken table, my mind walked with healers and holy men, with warriors and wise men, with scientists and philosophers. For me this was the true magic of the written word.
To read is a wondrous gift. It is an invitation into the mind of others, to be a guest at their table. Even more extraordinary is that this visit transcends both time and mortality. Here within the library walls I heard with my eyes the words of great teachers that lived and died centuries before I was born. In the quietness of this stone cut room, and upon its thick oak table, I dined with greatness.
It was true that the long staff we created was a work of art, but to see Mah Lin train with it was the real wonder. Selah, too, had continued to hone her martial skills. On horseback she rode in the ways of Hunnish warriors; arrows flying in rapid succession from the string of her ancient bow. At full gallop she could fell an acorn cluster from the highest branches of my oak.
Her legs controlled her horse, the bow and a fistful of arrows clutched in her left hand, the right plucking, drawing, and releasing her deadly projectiles. With a girl's delight she would charge at her father unleashing fierce volley while he practiced. Mah Lin would parry each missile with the bladed staff as easily as a mantis impales a cricket.
When not within my hands, the Five Element Sword and its shorter wooden ally were always on my back and at my waist. The intensity of all our physical training continued to increase, spurred by an urgency the monk chose not to reveal.
Until, “Arkthar,” he said on a cool fall day. He gazed northward with a serious expression, like the poorest farmer checks the weather. “Sickness in the body is the expression of an imbalance; Selah has taught you much about this theory.”
“Yes, Mah Lin, that is true,” I replied.
“I sense imbalance of another sort. I feel it gathering like a storm, ready to move from north to south.”
I was disturbed by the tone and demeanor of the monk. I looked at his bright eyes to see their focus.
“Protect and love my daughter for all time,” he said solemnly.
A silent “Yes,” was the answer of my eyes and soul.
Selah joined us now from across the field, her dark hair moved freely in the autumn breeze. She scanned our masked faces, which gave no clues of our private conversation, and yet, without so much as a question, she added, “I feel it too.”
The three of us walked toward the house. We knew that our time of peace here in the eye of the storm was coming to an end. I spread the remaining bat manure onto our hungry garden. It had served us well over the last three years, as I looked at it I realized its time too, was coming to an end. It would produce little more, and most of its food had been harvested. Selah had preserved what would keep us through the mild winter months, and I wondered what the next spring would yield.
I entered the house as the monk and his daughter finished the spicing of the evening meal. They shared a laugh at my smell, for I had spread the guano with my hands. Selah handed me the small garden shovel that I could not find, together with the soap and water. When I was clean and ready to sit, the priest said casually to his daughter, “Set another place for our guest.” At the prompting of the monk, Selah used the finest porcelain. Beside the matching cup and bowl, she carefully laid a beautiful pair of rosewood eating sticks. We had never had company, and there was comfort in seclusion. We wolfed down our good meal in the powerful presence of the formal but vacant setting.
Mah Lin refilled the nearly empty teapot from the boiling kettle above the central hearth. As he set it back upon the table, there was a loud cry outside from Selah's raven. The bird's harsh call was followed by three weak knocks at the wooden door. Before I could move to answer it, our guest was inside and sitting before the empty bowl. Without hesitation Selah had filled it to the stranger's polite protests of, “It is enough.”
I said nothing but stared at the old one as he happily ate. I saw the tattered black robes and the purple veins of his boney hands. They branched and twisted like the boughs and roots of the oak, or the streams that feed a river viewed from a great height, or the flash of lightning across the night sky. His glance in my direction pulled me back to the present.
He was enjoying every mouthful and savored morsels between swallows like each was a new experience.
Only when his bowl was emptied and his cup refilled did he and Mah Lin begin to freely speak. He was comfortable within our ancient walls, not like one who visited, but like an animal that after a life of wandering had finally returned home. I felt drawn to this beggar, but continued to study him from a respectful distance. His pale white skin was stretched to wrap his skeletal frame, and I saw that it was covered in ugly scars. Only those round black eyes spoke of his youth and vigor, those coal black eyes that spoke so loudly of life.
“Thank you,” he said to Selah through his toothless mouth, and turning to me like a proud grandfather, he added, “Arkthar, you have grown well.”
We four sat by hearth fire until the blackness melted from the eastern sky, and it began to glow red from the bellows of the coming day.
The beggar spoke of many things. He told Mah Lin the terrible details of the Northern siege and of a bear-cloaked commander who Mah Lin seemed to know. He talked with admiration of a young rebel, and he spoke of death. He looked at me often, to see if I was following the conversation, and kindly he spoke slowly and clearly. I had almost forgotten the horrors of war, for that was another life, but now the rhythm of his words joined my past with the present, and it was not a welcome guest. I felt the barren coldness of the northland blow across my soul.
As quickly as the account of siege ended, the story of the plague began. The dark stranger wove words with the power of a carpet maker, their crossing threads and fibers bound me to my place, and I listened deeply. There was a great dying over the entire land. It seemed that there were few places still untouched.
Selah also sat quietly, and listened with the open mind of the healer. When silence settled, she began the questioning of a skilled physician. “There is no pattern to this plague?”
“None that I have seen,” was the beggar's empty answer.
“You have walked in its shadow from its beginning, comforting the dying and burying the dead?”
“I have.”
“How is it that you did not fall?”
“Selah,” he ventured, “I do not know. I know only that I was young when the fever took me, and I have worn the scars of this illness ever since. I knew its touch, but not its embrace. Death did not claim me, for my fate it seems was with the living.” There was silence, as now we listened and she continued.
“Do you have any symptoms?” she asked.
“Only these,” he said as he rolled up a tattered sleeve to reveal two small boils on his skinny upper arm. “Usually there is nothing, but sometimes after I have been near the dying, I will get a small blemish on arm or leg. No fever, no pain, and no illness, just a small boil that bothers nothing and heals quickly.”
Selah was lost in deep concentration. Her mind examined all that she had ever learned about illness and affliction. She retraced and reviewed the process of healing, and the progression of disease. She chased after the solution but it remained hidden, cloaked in swirling mists at the farthest reaches of her mind. She strained at the work of drawing solid answers from miasmic thoughts. Mah Lin placed a concerned arm around his daughter's tired shoulders and soothed her worried mind. “Sleep my daughter,” he said. With a faraway look in her eyes she bid us goodnight.
In her dreams she continued to thrash about. Beside her mother once again, she saw the healing of her near dead father, and watched from shadow a woman's love wrestling life from the boney hands of Death. She struggled to pull clarity from the grip of chaos.
The truth arrived like a clap of thunder descending from the clouds of experience and intellect. The bolt on which it rode lit the darkness of her dreams. Awakened by this brightness, she opened her eyes and smiled the same calm smile as her beautiful mother, and said with certainty, “This is the pattern of the plague.”
The next morning as we sat for breakfast, Selah spoke her thoughts aloud. “It strikes with the random force of a storm's lightning, and like the bolt it never strikes the same place twice. Once hit, your body knows the enemy and has built its permanent defense. It cannot ravish those who already know its touch.”
Guided by a healer's wisdom and without any hesitation, she drew forth the needles that I had once feared so long ago. She held the tiny sword deftly between her fingers and scratched the surface of the beggar's lesion. Without fear she passed its small sharp tip to her forearm and moved it back and forth until the blood came.
In horror I was frozen even as she moved close and did the same to me, and then smoothly to her father who had already rolled up the sleeve of his saffron robe and revealed his mighty arm.
He looked to our guest, and amid the terror of war and disease, he smiled peacefully at Death.
The following day we slept late, well past the roosters morning call, for we were not quite well. The beggar ministered to us with care, the scratches on our arms had grown to a hard and angry abscess, and we three shared a fever and discomfort. The boil puckered and took on the look of a navel; it scabbed as the fevers passed. They healed as a pocked scar within a half-moon's passage. Selah carefully collected the fallen scabs, and we were sound once more.
When I awoke with the new dawn, I could not find my threadbare scholar's robes. With bare chest I entered the main room. The scars of my warrior past were now my only clothing. On the table before me was the chain mail armor that Selah had selected for me from the great hall. It was the armor of my country, but through its interlocking links she had woven the silken strips of my scholar robe into an artful pattern of love, power, and protection. The deepest of blues shone from between the metal rings. On top of this she had carefully placed my sword of Five Elements.
Our appetites had returned, and our tattered guest served us a beggar's breakfast. It was small, it was good, and it was enough. On the table before us he placed the open proclamation of the high chancellor. Its deep folds told of the time and distance over which it had been carried. There was no doubt, no hesitation, and no debate. We had our purpose and our direction. Mah Lin once again tucked the dragon's compass beneath his shimmering robes.
By the morning light we outfitted four horses for our journey to the capital. Provisions were packed by Selah and equally distributed among us. Mah Lin's freshly shaven head and many colored robe brought me back to the time of our first meeting. He adjusted his steel staff on the side of his mount. Selah was dressed in the simple brown robes of the desert's caress, the same ones from that time so long ago, the only visible difference was the bow and full quiver she now carried.
I expected nothing. I was in deportment closer to the nature of our horses. They were pleased to be worked and ridden, and indeed seemed happy to share in each other's company. The armored shirt was in itself a work of skill and wonder, and with the weavings of my silken robes it slid comfortably over my soldier's frame. I was not sure of our mission's duration, and focused instead on our task's noble purpose.
The beggar by contrast seemed almost jovial. A traveler by nature, he was happy not to be walking, and pleased to indulge in the ease and luxury of horseback. He smiled as he stroked the pale grey stallion and quoted an ancient proverb, “If wishes were horses, than beggars would ride.” The simple wisdom of these words amused the priest and instantly lightened our load. With a movement that belied his great age, he was up in the saddle and steadied his horse with an easy redistribution of his weight and a gentle tug on its bridle.
Selah watched from atop her white horse as I strapped my blade to my back and secured my wooden sword beneath my waistband. I swung my leg over the red charger and we were off. The horses moved without command along the river that was theirs. I surveyed our land from the height of my mount and was once more impressed by its rugged beauty. Onward we rode, past my sacred oak, past the roaring falls, and once again out into the world of the wild and the unfamiliar. The creatures of this place cast a glance at our departure, perhaps their gesture of respect.
I smiled inwardly, for I saw this now as profound but natural, far removed from former thoughts of witchcraft and sorcery. With our journey begun I felt at peace and comfortably energized. We four now moved as one. I saw the raven flash overhead as we left these ancient grounds.
With a subtle tipping of its outstretched wings it rose much higher, and looking downward a faded cry spoke its blessing.