The Cataclysm (3 page)

The book was battered, its leather spine scratched and cracked. As Mother held it out to
me, it opened by nature to a page near its end, as though use and care had trained it to
fall at the same spot, to the same lines.

She gestured that the lines were in Father's hand. Indeed, the whole book was in Father's
hand, for neither Arion nor any of the bards before him had written down their songs and
tales, preferring to pass them on to a listening apprentice, storing their songs in the
long dreaming vaults of their memories. But Father thought he was heirless and alone, and
had written them all - every poem and song and lay, from the edicts to the first shaking
of the city, down through the dark years unto this time. A dozen lines or so of one verse he had worried over, scratched out, revised, and replaced,
only to go back to the first version, to his first choice of wording.

I mouthed the lines, then read them aloud:

"DOWN IN THE ARM OF CAERGOTH HE RODE: PYRRHUS ALECTO, THE KNIGHT ON THE NIGHT OF BETRA Y ALS. WHEN A FIREBRAND OF BURNING HAD CLOUDED THE STRAITS OF HYLO. LIKE OIL ON WATER, HE SOOTHED THE IGNITED COUNTRY. FOREVER AND EVER THE VILLAGES LEARN HIS PASSAGE IN THE GRAIN OF THE PEASANTRY, LIFE OF THE RAGGED ARMIES. THEY CARRIED HIM BACK TO THE KEEP OF THE CASTLE WHERE PYRRHUS THE LIGHTBRINGER CANCELED THE WORLD BENEATH THE DENIAL OF BATTLEMENTS WHERE HE DIED AMID STONE WITH HIS HOVERING ARMIES.

FOR SEVENTEEN YEARS THE COUNTRY OF CAERGOTH HAS TURNED AND TURNED IN HIS EMBRACING HAND, A GARDEN OF SHIRES AND HAMLETS AND Lightbringer HISTORY HANGS ON THE PATH OF HIS NAME."

It was as though Father had never been satisfied. Something had drawn him to these lines
again and again, as if changing them would . . .

Would straighten the past, make it true.

“ 'Tis here, Mother,” I announced, so softly that at first she did not hear, though she
was staring directly at me as I read.

She cupped her ear, leaned forward. “ 'Tis in the poem. Or, rather, NOT in the poem.”
Mother frowned. I knew she saw Orestes in me now-

poetic and full of contradictions. I tried to be more clear about it.

“These lines Father wrote and rewrote and worked over are... are the lie. Don't you see,
Mother? The druidess said that THE PAST IS LIES, AND LIES CAN ALWAYS CHANGE. These are - ”
I thumbed through the book, looking early and late " - these are the only lines he has
fretted over.

“It's as though ... he was trying to ...” I looked at Mother. “... change the lies back to
the truth.”

I did not know whether that was so or not. I stepped quietly to the strongbox and took out
my father's harp, one thick string missing, and held it for a long moment. It fit my hand
exactly and when I put it down, I could not shake away its memory from my grasp. When I
looked at Mother again, her eyes had changed. We both knew what I would say next.

“Yes, I MUST go, but not because they seek me. I will go because I have to find the lost
song,” I announced. “Father's words are still hiding something.”

One of the dogs rumbled and rose from the shadows, stretching and sniffing lazily in the
dwindling firelight. Then his ears perked and he gave a low, angry growl.

Mother scrambled to her feet and to the door, a confusion of soundless sobs and flickering
hands. “I know. They're coming,” I said. "I must hurry.

Finding the truth is saving my life. The druidess said so." I stroked the ears of Mateo,
the largest of the dogs, who looked up at me solemnly, his thick shoulders pressing against my legs until I staggered a
little at the weight. I had no thought of how small I was - how things far greater would
press against me when I stepped across the threshold into the early winter morning.

Mother moved slowly aside as I passed into the pale sunlight, her fingers brushing softly,
mutely against my hair. I gave her a smile and a long hug, and she assured me of her own
safety. In the sled lay an old hide bag, big enough for the harp and the book, a loaf of
bread, and a wedge of cheese. I tossed everything in and moved off, as quickly and
silently as I could.

One of the dogs barked as I lost the cottage behind a cluster of blue AETERNA branches,
and the high wind shivered faintly at their icicles like the vanished notes of a song.
Above the hillside nearest my home, four long shadows fell across the trackless snow.

*****

There were other adventures that led me back to the peninsula - a wide arc of years and
travels across the continent, Finn's men at first only hours behind me, then less
constant, less menacing the farther south I traveled. I sent the dogs back to Mother soon
and traveled alone, sometimes working for a while at jobs where nobody knew me or thought
they knew me, where nobody cared that I never removed my hood.

It was a year, six seasons perhaps, before I realized exactly what it was about the song I
was searching for. It has long been practice that when a bard travels and sings, his songs are attended, remembered, and copied by those in the regions nearby. If a
song is a new one, it carries to still farther regions by word of mouth, from bard to
bard, from orator to folksinger to storyteller to bard again.

It is a tangled process, and the words change sometimes in the telling, no matter how we
try to rightly remember. The old lines from Arion's song I heard in Solamnia as I had heard in the small town of Solace as and the southern lines made me laugh, distorted like gossip in their passage across the
straits.

For I had the book with me, and within it (he truth unchangeable. As I traveled, I knew I
would come to a place when I would hear those scratched and worried lines of my father's -
the lines about Pyrrhus Alecto, about Lightbringer and history and glory - but I would
hear them in a different version.

And I would know at last what Pyrrhus Orestes had altered.

*****

Across the Straits of Schallsea I once stowed away on a ferry. The enraged ferryman
discovered me under a pile of badger hides, and he threatened to throw me overboard for
evading his fee. He relented when he pushed back my hood and saw the scars from the
burning.

“Firebringer,” he snarled. “Only my fear of Branchala, of the curse upon bard-slayers,
stays my hand from your murder.” I cherished his greeting. It was the first of many such
conversations.

Over the grain fields of Abanasinia I wandered, in a journey from summer to summer and
threat to threat. Three times I heard “Song of the Rending” - once from a minstrel in
Solace, again in the city of Haven from a seedy, unraveled bard who had forgotten entire
passages about the collapse of Istar, whereby his singing lost its sense, and finally from
a blind juggler wandering the depths of the plains, whose version was wild and comical, a
better story by far than Arion's.

The minstrel and the juggler repeated Father's altered lines word for word. But the
juggler recited them with a curious look, as though he was remembering words contrary to
those he was speaking. Although I asked him and asked him again about it, he would tell me
nothing. Faced with his silence, I began to believe I had imagined his discomfort, that it
was only my hope and dreaming that had expected to find the missing lines.

And so, back across the straits I sailed, in the summer of my sixteenth year, and again
the ferryman called me Fire-bringer, cursing me and spitting at me as he took my money.

On Solamnic shores once more, I started for home, but discovered that no village would
shelter me on the journey. “Firebringer,” they called me, and “Orestes the Torch,” meeting
me on the outskirts of the hamlets with torches of their own, with stones and rakes and
long peninsular knives.

Some even pursued me, shouting that the fires would die with the one who brought them.
Like the ferryman, like Finn, they thought I was my father.

*****

To the north lay the great Solamnic castles - Vingaard and Dargaard, Brightblade and
Thelgaard and DiCaela. Each would take me in of a night for the sake of my grandfather. These families would nurse me
on occasion, for my scars burned with growing intensity as the seasons turned and the
fires to the west raged and the years passed by me. Sometimes the knights let me stay for
a week, perhaps two, but the peasants would clamor, would talk of traitors and firebrands,
and I would be asked to leave, would be escorted from Solamnic holdings by a handful of
armed cavalry.

The knights would apologize there at the borders, and tell me that their hearts were heavy
for me ... that the welfare of the order and the people took precedence . . . that, had
there been another way, they would have been glad to ...

In all those high places, I asked after Arion's song. Solamnia was, after all, the bard's
sanctuary, the harp's haven. All of the schooled poets had retreated to these courts, and
all knew the works of Arion of Coastlund.

I showed around the scratched and amended passage near the poem's end. All the bards
remembered it, and remembered no other version. As I sat alone in the vaulted hall of
Vingaard Keep, my thickened hands strumming Father's harp in the vast and echoing silence,
it almost seemed to me that the walls shuddered with my clumsy music, the one string still
and always missing.

*****

In my seventeenth year, the peninsula had burned clear up to Finn's own holdings.

Out of the stronghold of his lair in the seaside caverns at Endaf, from which his horsemen
could harry the trade routes north from Abanasinia and his notorious ships, the NUITARI
and the VIPER, could find safe harbor, Finn terrorized the cape and covered the shore with
the husks of schooners and brigantines, off course in the smoke from the mainland.

It was rumored by some that an ancient evil had returned, in those brief years before the
War of the Lance. Finn was one of those who harbored them, the populace whispered. For in
the depths of his seaside cavern lay an intricate web of still larger caverns, tunnel
devolving on tunnel, the darkness slick and echoing. This was the legendary Finn's Ear, where it was supposed that all sounds muttered in shelter of stone eventually and
eternally circled and spoke. At the heart of Finn's labyrinth was said to lay a monster,
his black scales glittering with cold malice and devouring acid.

They said that the beast and the bandit had struck an uneasy truce: Finn soothed the
monster with the music of well paid but exhausted bards, and, lulled by continual song,
the great creature received in turn the company of the bandit king's uncooperative
prisoners. And as to the fate of those poor wretches, even the rumormongers were silent.

In the rough border country between Lemish and Southlund, cooling myself in the high
foothills of the Garnet Mountains, I pondered the looming necessity of actually going to
Finn's Ear, where the bards were singing and the caverns echoing. It was the only place I
had not searched for the song.

Hooded as always to hide my livid scars, I crossed that border and stalked through the
burning peninsula, keeping the towers of Caergoth to the north as I traveled toward the
little villages in the west. My route took me within Finn's own sight, had he cared to
leave his rocky throne and look west from the beetling cliffs.

For days I wandered through hot country and distant rising smoke. I would stand outside
the village pubs, hooded and shrouded like a highwayman or a self-important mage, and
through open windows I heard the nervous talk, the despair of farmer and villager alike.

Spontaneous fires arose in the dry grain fields, leaving the countryside a wasteland of
ash and cinder. In droves the farmers were leaving, no longer able to fight the flames.
All this disaster, they claimed, had enraged Finn to the point where, in the search for
remedy, he had offered an extravagant bounty to any bard or enchanter who could extinguish
the fires with song or incantation.

Hard words about a curse drifted through one of the windows. I heard the name of my
father. It lightened my steps somehow, as I passed through the deserted village of Ebrill
in the early morning, then over the ruins of Llun and Mercher, moving ever westward,
believing now that my quest would at last be done. Endaf was the last place Finn would
look for a far-flung quarry, and my father's name rode on the smoky air.

It was midmorning when I reached Endaf. I wandered the village for a while, weaving a path
amid the deserted cottages and charred huts and lean-tos, all looking like a grim memory
of a village. And it was odd walking there, passing the old flame-gutted ruins of the inn
and knowing that somewhere in its vanished upper story my father had received the scars I
had mysteriously inherited.

I turned abruptly from the ashes. I was eighteen and impatient, and had come very far for
the truth. The old acrid smell of Endaf faded as I walked from the ruins on a rocky and
shell-strewn path, and as I trudged west I caught the sharp smell of salt air and heard
the faint cries of gulls and cormorants.

*****

About a mile from the center of the village, Finn's Ear burrowed into a sheer limestone
cliff overlooking the Cape of Caergoth. Black gulls perched at its edge, the gray rock
white with their guano, loud with their wailing cries.

Steps had been chopped in the steep rock face, whether by the bandits or by a more ancient
hand it was hard to tell, given the constant assault of storm and birds. I took my place
in the middle of a rag-tag group of beggars, farmers, bards and would-be bandits, each
awaiting an audience with King Finn of the Dark Hand.

As I waited, the bards talked around and over me in their language of rumor. The gold
thread at the hems of cape and cloak was tattered, frayed; each wooden harp was chipped
and warped, each bronze one dented and tarnished.

No famous poets these, no Quivalen Sath or Arion of Coastlund. They were courtiers with
trained voices and a studied adequacy for the strings. Now, in single file on the rocky
steps, each encouraged the other, thereby encouraging himself.