The Hammer of the Sun (71 page)

It was a blow from which, perhaps, Kerys never quite recovered. Soon after the sailing Barech, supported by many who were suffering its consequences, raised a rebellion against Dormaidh and toppled him. He became king, and his heirs after him, and save for one act of cruelty he was not as bad a ruler as his beginning had promised; his worst fault was a certain weakness and indecision, which had perhaps been seen in Dormaidh also, and inability
to
restrain the warring factions. Yet it is not unlikely that he did indeed represent some altered strain in the Ysmerien. For though after him, as before, there were kings strong and weak, good and less good, that indecisive nature appeared more and more often, till in the end the kings were reduced to puppets of their powerful warlords and marshals, and were at the last overthrown by one such of the Lonuen line, who took their place; and his great-grandson was Nithaid.

That act of cruelty was significant. It is said that Barech took Dormaidh to the shore and mockingly sent the defeated regent and a few close companions to sea in an ill-equipped hulk, bidding them also seek new kingdoms to conquer. Cruel as this was to a man very likely his own father, it is possible to understand the grievance he bore. The land was cruelly impoverished by losing so many, and the nature of its people changed. The Svarhath in particular dwindled from that time, becoming a far smaller adjunct to the Penruthya than they were anywhere in the new lands save only Kerbryhaine; and without them, as Elof suspected, Kerys began to follow the same downward slope. Together, both strains added up to a great people; but with their mutual influence removed, each followed their own particular downward paths, into harsh and demoralized decadence or sullen rusticity respectively. Clearly some more radical blending was needed in them both; and it may be that it was this, harsh as it seemed, that the downfall of all their lands in the ending of the Long Winter provided.

Of the fortunes of the folk of Kerys in its immediate aftermath a little is known, for one or two fortunate ships still managed to escape across the oceans to Morvanhal in the years that followed. Relatively few lives were lost, for in the wake of that unnatural winter a sudden and balmy summer followed, and a sudden explosion of growth. The Wild Lands, to which most in the north had escaped, took flower and fruited, and rough patches could be cleared and sown here and there, and shelters built against the coming winter; in the south the jungle also provided some food. So few if any starved; but the life they clung to was hard, with hardly a trace of its former luxury, or even of civilization. The duergar might have helped, fallen as they too were; but the gulf between them and men was grown too wide. Objects of fear they were and remained to -he sundered folk. Of the north the last that was heard, a generation later, spoke of a reversion to the levels of the stone age; and of the south, nothing. In so short a time was the glory of that land brought at last to the dust; yet against the span of time, even all the millennia of its rise and fall seem little longer, and are swallowed up in that greater river so thoroughly that they might as well never have been.

Languages

The tongues of Kerys were, like its peoples, very close to those of their kin in Brasayhal, and more has been said of these in earlier appendices. However, they were less close than would appear from the text of the chronicles, and it is likely that Roc and Elof had a great deal more trouble making themselves understood than the account suggests. The grammar of both versions of Penruthya appears to have remained substantially intact over the long period of their separation; but such matters as word termination had altered drastically, and even the meanings of many common words. The accents also had changed; Roc had the advantage here, for Elof s clear Northern accents sounded alien to the Penruthya, though not unpleasant, and startlingly august to northerners such as Trygvar. It was as if an Englishman of today were addressed by a fine speaker of Shakespeare's English. The Northern tongue had changed less, for its speakers had become an extreme minority, and as minorities do they guarded their tongue jealously, hugging it close to them and teaching and using it with meticulous care.

Arcane Beliefs and Arts

Of these also much else has been said earlier; but some points arise only in the Book of the Armring. In Kerys, for example, the probable origin of the River as a concept of time and the cycles of the world, and as a border and barrier to the land of the dead, are best seen, for to the first men who looked upon it that awesome flow must have seemed like the bounds of the world indeed. At some later date, though, the Milky Way seems to have become identified with the metaphysical River, and been given the same name. But by Kermorvan's day it was no longer seriously thought of in that sense, save by the least educated of folk, and the River had become a wholly philosophical concept. Yet nevertheless, that misty streak across the night skies persisted as a symbol of potent meaning, at least as significant as the Iceglow which seemed to be forever and futilely seeking to blot it out.

By that time the rather vague concept of reincarnation the peoples of Kerys favoured had coalesced, and for that also the River became a symbol. As something set afloat upon the Yskianas' waters would eventually find shore elsewhere, so might the returning spirit; unless it were weighted or dragged down. It is interesting that Elof is not made by the chroniclers
to
endorse that, as one might expect; but to declare his ignorance of it. Evidently they wished to stress that within this world even the Powers have bounds, for better or for worse.

Smithcraft

In the chronicles the nature of Elof s smithcraft is discussed and debated at every turn, as to whether it was an attribute of a human or a power; but this these present accounts could hardly reflect, without revealing more than Elof himself knew at the time. The conclusion come to is the one that Elof suggests in passing; that all smithcraft in humanity was a gift of the Powers, a counterbalance to what they knew its foes would one day hurl against it. Whether or not that gift was reclaimed or exhausted, or simply lies dormant for want of knowledge to awaken it, cannot be said. But Elof s case is clearer. Those who came before him had been more than human, and that was their glory and all too often their downfall; so Elof had, by the very nature of his mission, to be no more than human if he was to succeed. So though the power he had was great,
it
must have been no more than the most a human might have had, albeit an exceptional one; or, more probably, it was as great as any human might have found within himself, had he only the will to awaken it.

It was a great endowment; yet without the dedication to learn its uses and the skills to exploit them, it would have been meaningless. It was in these that Elof s true achievement lay, and in these that his mastery truly surpassed any other of that time. Certainly the materials and processes he used, though mysterious, are not wholly beyond our own comprehension.

The mirror-shields seem to have been no more than some light and hard alloy, perhaps upon a bracing frame of wood or metal tube. Their chiefest subtlety lay in their shape which caught and concentrated the sun so well, and in the truly mysterious influence that held them in such unison both as shieldwall and as solar mirror. Such tight coordination and focussing is the problem which bedevils modern solar furnaces; they are capable of astonishing temperatures, such is the power the sun sheds upon us, but are very clumsy at concentrating it. Nevertheless there is evidence that some part of this problem was solved in ancient times. The Greek philosopher Archimedes, among the defences he created for his home city of Syracuse, is said to have fired enemy ships by just such a burning-glass, a feat historians have long sneered at because of the problems such mirrors involve. But recently a more practical archaeologist realised that he might have used the long Greek shields, highly polished, and tried an experiment with some twenty modern replicas of these, representing quite a good-sized area of reflector. Under the noon sun their combined beams were well able to set afire the timbers of a boat moored in the harbour. Elof s shields represented a surface thousands of times greater, and much more carefully and uniformly shaped. In such greater numbers and more skilfully shaped, and with their beams concentrated by the mastershields into near-perfect intensity, they must have achieved astonishing temperatures. It is ironic that the Ice's ultim-ate plan was to raise the world's albedo and so reflect away the life-giving solar energy; for Elof simply reflected it back at them.

That fine fibre of which both Gorthawer and his wings were shaped is rather more mysterious to our eyes. Yet essentially it was almost certainly more refinement of carbon or graphite fibres, many varieties of which we can produce under a very great and sustained heat; and of such a heat, in his day, some kinds of lava-flow would have been an adequate source. Such fibres depend for their remarkable properties upon their crystalline structure, and the ability the duergar taught him to study this under heat must have given him wide control over them. This, incidentally, the chronicles speak of as if it was a natural ability; but more probably he made use of some device, and his own subtlety lay in the true interpreting of it. For in this, as in all else, he was as he wished his friends to think him, a man only.

Such signposts as he left himself, all those generations past, would have been meaningless as his power without the will and daring to exploit them, and the sheer disregard of himself. Had he not shed his old life willingly, it is likely his labours, and most of all those in the furnace would have curtailed it, or at any rate brought on him a miserable and suffering old age; but the greater flame that burned within him spared him that.

THE DUERGAR

In the Book of the Sword some brief glimpses remain of the Duergar people at what, in these latter years, was very probably their peak. In the Book of the Helm their decline and disappearance is hinted at; and in the Book of the Armring its progress is seen. They were undoubtedly a very ancient folk, and equally a very strange one by the standards of ordinary men. To grasp something of how alien they were, one needed only consider a race who were aware of many of the possibilities of science and technology, up to and including some grasp of the structure of matter and the potential energies it could unleash; yet who chose not to pursue or exploit that knowledge. Neither their dwelling underground, nor their characteristic physical shape, can set them further apart from men than that; for they were enough like us to interbreed, and they had not always dwelt beneath the earth. Some of them could understand men, and even become friends with them and more, as has been seen; in the end, as the world changed about them, many united with men, and brought with them their many virtues. But these were always a small minority. Ildryan, as he is shown to us, is much more characteristic of the majority of duergar, a cold and remote personality, with his concept of ethics governed by payment and return, even in a forced bargain. Elof s assessment of him shows how well he understood these people, for reasons that he could not have realised at the time. It is ironic that, when he first sought their help, he was himself, without knowing it, demanding a
quid pro quo;
for it was to the Power he had once been that the whole race owed its very survival.

The Beginnings of the Duergar

Some words of Ils', which are not included in the tale, throw a grim light upon this; they were spoken in royal council, to support Kermorvan's plan to aid Kerys, and promise the duergar's aid. "We should act! And act in time! For once before we have stood here, and failed to; and it was almost the end of us. Not for nothing do you call us the Elder Folk; for all that you are we once were, all and more. Once we too had spread out across the world, had explored the secrets of nature to their depths, only to find what gulfs lay beyond them. We too dreamed ourselves rulers of the world, not brief tenants of another's halls. Then the Ice came. Then that earlier Long Winter rolled over us, and scoured away all that we had built. Had Ilmarinen not helped us, shaped us our refuges beneath the hollow hills, and taught us new ways to live and to survive, then we should have been altogether destroyed. We were neither as numerous nor as aggressive as you humans; we were not so ready to rip the whole wide world apart and tack it back together again to suit us. We might have been driven back to savagery; and if both your race and mine do not act for themselves now, we may yet be. One alone came to help us, when it seemed that all other doors were shut, and many hope he will again; but I fear even his face is turned from us now."

This was not so; for Elof himself sat by her as she spoke these words, as she afterwards recalled. But she was right, in that he had no intention of maintaining the duergar in the state he had left them, even had he the power to do. As he himself had suggested in his plea to the old king Andvar, Ilmarinen had saved them for a purpose, that the riches of their culture might not wholly vanish from the world, that they might serve as a bridge and an inspiration to struggling future generations, just as he promised Kermorvan he should. To that end he had sought almost to "store" them underground, in an environment and a way of life that was relatively fixed, hoping that when the Winter was spent and the Ice withdrew, they would emerge and join the new men coming into their lands, and teach them their ancient wisdom.

To some extent his plan worked. As Ils suggested, many of the greatest works of men of the elder days were created with advice, at least, from the duergar; the High Gate, for example, would not have been possible without their skill with stone. Even in less happy days men might, from time to time, awake their interest or their compassion, which was greater than might have been expected, and learn from them again. So it was with the Mastersmith, and so also Elof himself; though it may have counted for much with the more obdurate of them that he had saved many of their people's lives, and had only his own and one other in return, for on such petty balances their ethics might rest. They could be generous with their gifts, if they took to a human, and undoubtedly he learned much from them, more even than smithcraft, either directly or from what the Mastersmith had gleaned. His skill in navigation came from them, and more arcane knowledge, often of a quite startling extent. The account of the reasoning by which he grasped Louhi's intention to use the volcanos of Kerys (and perhaps of the Westlands, before that) is notable because it suggests that he had some knowledge of the existence of continental platforms, the so-called "plates"; but equally he seems not to have understood anything of their movement and interaction, or any of the processes with which modern plate tectonics is concerned. Most probably, therefore, his knowledge was second-hand, and not a result of his own deductions; there is nowhere else he could have come by it save from the duergar, and it is more likely his fault than theirs that he did not grasp the full concept. And indeed such drift would be a hard thing to grasp, in a world half shelled in ice; but the duergar remembered it differently.