The Last Banquet (Bell Mountain) (28 page)

“I’ll never get back to Lintum Forest,” he thought. It seemed that he, who’d never wanted any more than to be left alone, would die an Abnak war chief. “That, at least, is funny!” he thought.

In the golden hall there was a banquet every night for all the mardars. The Thunder King sat on his throne, behind his golden mask, and neither ate nor drank, nor spoke a word, nor moved. It was uncanny, Lord Reesh thought.

Before they sat down to eat, the mardars turned to the Thunder King, bowed their heads and spoke a prayer: “O god over all gods, master of the universe, hail! We pledge our service to you to the death—to you, all-powerful, who cannot die.”

Reesh was expected to dine with the mardars every night and join them in the recitation of this prayer. “You must not keep silence,” Kyo told him. “It would be taken as an act of rebellion and punished swiftly. The mardars would seize you and throw you to the great cat.”

Reesh said the prayer. He didn’t know what Kyo would do if he confessed he didn’t believe the Thunder King to be a god.

“What does it matter, my lord?” Gallgoid said, when Reesh told him about it. “You never believed in God when you were First Prester in God’s Temple, yet you led the prayers.”

But it was a commandment of old, according to Scripture, that neither the Children of Geb nor their descendants were to worship any god but God. It was the first divine commandment given to them after the sons of men were cast out of Paradise. How many kings had been destroyed for disobedience? How many times had the people been afflicted with famine, war, or pestilence because they’d disobeyed and set up idols in Obann and honored the false gods of the Heathen?

The Scriptures were just stories that had survived from ancient times and probably not even true stories, at that. So Reesh believed. But it was necessary for the common people to believe in Scripture, and Reesh had spent many years seeing to it that the Temple fostered such belief. It was good for the nation, and his own unbelief had nothing to do with it.

Why, then, did it distress him to say prayers to the Thunder King?

“It’d trouble me,” said Gallgoid, “but I’m only an assassin, not a scholar. Besides which, my lord, they’ll kill you if you refuse to say the prayers.”

So Reesh said prayers to the Thunder King and feasted with the mardars every night and shuddered whenever the great cat’s green eyes chanced to fall on him.

“No one knows what kind of beast it is, nor whence it came,” Kyo said. “Some men captured it one day, up in the hills north of Kara Karram, and presented it to the Thunder King. Our master feeds it on the flesh of slaves and rebels. You will see that done, if we stay here long enough. It is said that our master himself called the beast up, out of the depths of the earth. Certainly no man has ever seen another of its kind.”

Around the walls of the banquet chamber, behind the high chairs, stood massive wooden posts with rudimentary, rather sad-looking faces carved into them near the top and barbarous runes inscribed below the faces.

“Those contain the spirits of the gods whom our master has imprisoned,” Kyo explained. “Here they must stand, powerless, to witness his greatness and his continuing victories. They groan and wail most piteously, but only our master the Thunder King can hear them. Once he has conquered all the nations of the world, then he will devour their gods.”

Superstitious tripe, thought Reesh, fit only for overawing primitive pagans. Nevertheless, he said prayers to the Thunder King while Gallgoid every night had his suppers in a wooden hall with the mardars’ servants, who merely caroused and otherwise enjoyed themselves.

“But we do have to watch what we say, my lord,” he said. “They all believe the Thunder King’s a god. Those who don’t, get fed to the cat. Those who do, might wind up in Hell when all is said and done. But that at least comes later.”

In King Oziah’s Wood, the rangers watched intently as the Thunder King’s army clawed itself to pieces. The Abnaks tried to escape; the Zeph and the Wallekki tried to wipe them out. “They won’t be invading the forest anytime soon,” Huell said. A few of the Abnaks had tried, but the rangers’ arrows had accounted for them all. “But we’ll have to be ready in case they try to come in without the Abnaks.”

Huell didn’t know that the Omah were coming out of the forest every night to kill as many Heathen as they could. They couldn’t kill many, but they were destroying the courage of the army. The Heathen thought they were imps and devils, summoned by witchcraft, and feared them inordinately. Huell didn’t know because there was no one to tell him. Wytt hadn’t told Jack and Ellayne that the attacks were continuing: it wasn’t in his nature to give reports. He came and went as he pleased. Wherever the rangers made camp, Wytt found them. He liked to come late at night and snuggle up in Ellayne’s arms. He would leave early in the morning, and none of Huell’s rangers ever saw him.

But somehow Chillith knew of Wytt’s comings and goings. One night, he drew Jack aside to speak to him alone—a little distance out of the camp, under the stars.

“I know what the little hairy men are doing,” he said. “You remember how my men and I thought your Wytt was a kind of devil, and how we feared him. The men on the plain are more afraid than we were! Their fear cries out to me, even in my sleep. Those men fear witchcraft. At first they thought it was the Abnaks’ witchcraft; but they have driven away or killed the Abnaks and still the little devils afflict them by night.”

“Yes, well, Ellayne and I saw it, the first time they did it,” Jack said. “There’s no need to tell me.”

“That’s not what I want to tell you,” Chillith said. He lowered his voice. “Your God has spoken to me. I must confront the Thunder King. God has shown him to me in a dream, sitting in a golden hall atop the mountains. He feasts with his mardars. In the spring he intends to come down and destroy Obann. But before that happens, I must stand before him and denounce him. And then God will destroy him.”

Jack shivered. “Why are you telling me this, Chillith? What do you mean, ‘denounce him’?”

“That will be seen when I do it. Only then.”

“But what do you want from me?”

“Your little hairy man, to guide me up the mountains: to protect me. He’ll do it, if you ask him.”

“They say the mountains are crawling with warriors,” Jack said. “Even with Wytt to help, you’ll never get past them.”

“If they capture me, well and good—they’ll take me to the Thunder King,” Chillith said. “If your friend can keep me from stepping off a cliff, it’ll be enough. But I must start soon.”

Jack didn’t like any of this, not a bit. “I can’t just tell Wytt to go,” he said. “It’d have to be both me and Ellayne. You should ask her, too.”

Chillith smiled. “She would say no.”

“If I send Wytt away without asking her,” Jack said, “she’d kill me. And then she’d follow after him, and Martis and I would have to follow her, and the next thing you know, it’d be a cuss’t parade—and we’d all get caught.”

“That’s what I’m trying to avoid,” Chillith said. “There is no need for anyone but me to stand before the Thunder King: I only have been called. Let it be a secret from Ellayne. Wytt can return to you after I’m captured.”

Jack shook his head, forgetting Chillith couldn’t see him. “She’d find out. I won’t do it. You’ll have to ask her.”

“I’ll go alone, if I have to,” Chillith said. “It is the will of God.”

“What are you two doing?”

Jack startled. It was Ellayne; they hadn’t heard her coming. “What’s the will of God?” she said. “What are you talking about?”

“You might as well know,” Jack said, and so they told her.

“You must be crazy,” she said to Chillith. “They’ll kill you.”

“I know,” he said. “But when God called you to climb Bell Mountain, did you not go? If He can take away my sight, He can take away my life at any time. So I will obey!

“I was a mardar. One day I would have been presented to the Thunder King, and I would have sworn to serve him as my god. He would have taught me secrets and invested me with powers. For this, the true God blinded me. He put me in the dark so I could see. Only then did I see my own wickedness.”

“We should all go with you,” said Ellayne, “Jack and Martis and me.”

“I forbid it. You have not been called.”

Ellayne didn’t answer right away. “What’s she thinking?” Jack wondered. It was one thing to obey God, he thought—and quite another to do something foolhardy because you wanted to do it. He wished Obst were there. Obst would know what to do.

And then Ellayne said, “All right. When Wytt comes again, I’ll ask him to guide you up the mountains. I don’t know that he’ll do it, but I’ll ask.”

Wytt didn’t come that night. The children lay awake in their shelter, waiting for him, but he didn’t come. After an hour or two of thinking, Jack whispered to Ellayne, “I know you—and you’re up to something. You’d never let Wytt go without us, so what’s your plan?”

“To do what God wants: to help Chillith,” she said. “Wytt won’t leave us. It wouldn’t matter how I asked him. But God wants Chillith to go—I do believe him, you know!—and Chillith can’t go without Wytt, and Wytt won’t go without us. So we’ll go. We’ll follow along behind, and Wytt will know we’re there, but Chillith won’t.”

Jack snorted. “And what about Martis?” he said. “The last time we snuck off without him, it was nothing but trouble. You know he’ll follow us.”

“He won’t have to, this time,” Ellayne said. “This time we’ll ask him to come along with us.”

Right on up to see the Thunder King! It was daft, Jack thought. “He’ll kill us all.” And he was pretty sure that if God didn’t call you to do a foolish thing like that, it was better not to do it.

Shingis and the Blays didn’t know what to do with themselves. They were treated as Gurun’s personal retainers, so no one gave them any work to do. They ate and slept in a building next door to the palace along with many of King Ryons’ warriors. Those men were Wallekki, Abnaks, Fazzan, and Griffs, none of whom spoke the Blays’ language: so they had no one to talk to. Time hung heavily on their hands. After a few days of this, Shingis finally got into the palace to see Gurun.

They took him to a little room with pictures painted on the walls and ceiling, and a window looking out over the rooftops of the city. Never in his life had he seen anything like it. On the ceiling were painted clouds and the sun. He couldn’t see the point of that. And Gurun was in a bright yellow dress that made her look like a flower. He shook his head.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“We go back soon to Jocah Creek?” he said. “Nice place, nice people—not so different from Blays’ country. Not like this city.”

“I liked Jocah’s Creek, too,” Gurun said. “But I don’t know when I can go back. My filgya told me to stay with the king. You and your men can go back to Jocah’s Creek, if you like.”

“No, no! We stay with you. Who else will pray for us?”

“You don’t need me to pray for you, Shingis. You can pray for yourselves. Just talk to God, and He will hear you.”

But that idea unsettled him. She could see it in his face. The Blays had been Heathen, worshipping idols. These had to be offered food before they could be prayed to. And then the Thunder King took them away, and the Blays had no gods. Gurun wondered if they would ever get over it. Would they ever understand that they belonged to the real God now? But then, she thought, the people of Obann didn’t seem to grasp that any better than the Blays. What good had their Temple done them?

“It is strange, to be in such a city as this,” she said, “as strange for me as it is for you. Look at this dress they gave me! It’s beautiful, but it’s much more than I need. In all the islands of my homeland there is no dress like this. Everything in Obann is so grand! It’s like being in a dream.”

“Some of us, we are afraid of this place,” Shingis said. “Everything too big: it might all fall down, someday.”

“I know,” Gurun said, thinking of her home and family. “Tell the men, Shingis, that I will come and see them tonight after supper. We will all pray together. I would like that.”