In the Earth Abides the Flame (12 page)

'Are you certain?'

'If I am correct, we should find on the covers of the other three books a tall blue wave breaking over a slender spire, a golden arrow with long red feathers, and two hands clasped in friendship,' Phemanderac recited.

As he spoke the Archivist spread the volumes out across the bench. Phemanderac drank in the books with hungry eyes.

'The five missing books,' he announced quietly. 'The Sun, the Mariswan, the Wave, the Arrow, and the Hands.' He paused, and when he spoke again his voice was hoarse with emotion. 'My life is complete.'

'You have other books like these? What makes them so special?' The Archivist's voice trembled.

'I have never read the other books, though I have seen them,' said the philosopher. 'They are locked in a glass box, deep in the heart of the Hall of Lore in the land of my fathers, holy relics revered above all other treasures of our land. Each of them has a picture carved into the leather of its cover: the Fountain, the Vale, the Fire, the Cloud, and the Rock.' As he recited their names he referred to a deeply ingrained visual memory, the covers spread in front of his eyes.

'Why are they valuable?'

'They are over two thousand years old,' Phemanderac said. 'What preserves them is beyond our power to discover; in all that time our scholars have not needed to transcribe them. They were authored in Dona Mihst, they are of the Vale of the First Men, and preserve the history and culture of our common ancestors. My country would be prepared to pay a fortune for them.'

'And your country is—'

'Dhauria. What remains of the Vale of the First Men.'

'But - that country is a country of myth!' The Archivist scratched his balding head. 'I have been happy to entertain you in this library: goodness knows how few people care for the things of the past. But now you tell me you have walked out of myth and into my store of old books. How can I believe you?'

'It doesn't matter whether you do or you don't, for here I am. Dhauria I came from, a land beyond Desicca, the Deep Desert, and in that land the past is prized above the present, to our cost. In that land five books are our chief treasure. Now I discover that five more indeed exist, as Hauthius told us, and are within my grasp. Is this then a time for me to deceive you with needless falsehoods?'

'And these books reveal themselves at the exact time in which you come to Instruere? Is this not a coincidence too great for the imagination?'

'Of course not,' said Phemanderac. 'Far from being coincidental, it was inevitable. You said yourself this afternoon that I appeared determined to read everything in your archive. How could these books have remained hidden?'

The Archivist nodded, obviously recognising the sense of the argument. 'Let us for the moment assume you come from the Vale of the First Men. How were the books lost to your library?'

'We have always assumed they were destroyed by the great wave which drove the First Men from the Vale,' Phemanderac said as he mused it over. 'The other five, so the legend is told, were found floating on the waters by the few members of the Rehtal Clan who chose to remain in the Vale. But now 1 see that it was not so. Someone of those who remained in Dona Mihst must have removed them and brought them here, in violation of the command of the Most High. What harm has been done?'

'What is written in them?' The Archivist loved history, though even his passion met its match with this stranger, and he was eager to read the books. He reached out to take the Wave book.

'Wait a moment,' Phemanderac commanded, and the Archivist withdrew his hand. 'Books like these must be approached slowly, otherwise their contents will be taken too lightly. For two thousand years we have speculated as to the nature and subjects of the missing books. We knew their names, as they are referred to cryptically in the five works in our library, as Hauthius revealed to us, but he - and we - could guess at little of their contents. The Book of the Sun was believed to contain lists of those who passed into the presence of the Most High, translated after a life of devotion to Him. We knew the Book of the Mariswan by another name: the Song of Losian, the record of those who rejected the Fire of Life and left the Vale.

We always supposed the Book of the Clasped Hands was a record of the Domaz Skreud, recording the disobedience of the First Men and the rise of the Destroyer, written by Weid of the House of Wenta. The Book of the Golden Arrow was the symbol of the righteous judgments of the Most High, and most scholars agreed it was a book of law. The Book of the Wave, it was thought, talked of the destruction of the Vale, or it might have been a symbol of the blessing of the Most High.'

He drew a shallow breath through tension-whitened lips. 'We are about to find out.'

The Pinion was a long, low building near the centre of the Great City, sited next to the much taller Hall of Meeting. Unlike the latter, it was plain and unadorned, with but one door at each end and few windows. The Instruian guards were housed within the one floor visible to the general population, and it was through this barracks Leith and Mahnum were taken. The boy cast a concerned eye over his father's limp form being dragged along in front of him. The Trader had tried the patience of the guards beyond what they had considered reasonable, which was not very far, and a blow to the head with the hilt of a sword had silenced him.

Some way behind him the Bhrudwan came, silent and impassive. As Leith stumbled through the single room that seemed to stretch away forever, chafed and bruised from his bonds, heads glanced up to stare at his sandy hair, unusual in the city, and perhaps to wonder to themselves what part of Faltha this one came from. They would soon know. The Instruian guards were justifiably proud of their success in encouraging their guests to talk.

A spiral stone stair led down from the centre of the long room to the lower levels of the building. While an official secret, the average Instruian knew enough about these lower levels to harbour a strong desire never to see them. Constructed by forced labour during the Bhrudwan occupation of Faltha a thousand years before, they were an exact copy of the lower levels of Andratan. Many terrible things had happened down the stair while the Bhrudwans ruled Instruere. Instead of destroying it, as many survivors of that time urged them, the city rulers had made use of it; first for innocent purposes - storage of grain and the like - but latterly it had begun to acquire a reputation equally as sinister as it had previously owned.

Leith knew none of this as the guards propelled him down the torchlit stair, but the fear that had hovered around him since his arrest now settled on his shoulders like a black mantle.

At the bottom of the stair lay the lowest level of the building, and it was to this level they took Leith. But I've recently escaped from this, he thought as they thrust both him and the limp body of his father into a cell. Instruere was supposed to be a refuge! We often talked of it as a place of hope, the end of our quest; and now 1 find myself in a dungeon fouler even than the one in Adunhk. Like that fortress, each cell in The Pinion had a single window; but unlike Adunlok the window looked inward into darkness, not outward into light.

The door clanged shut. Leith nearly gagged as the stench from the cell overpowered him.

When his eyes finally adjusted to the lack of light he noticed a communal toilet - little more than a bucket -in a corner near the door. It appeared not to have been emptied for some time.

At the far end of the cell he could make out dim figures sitting, lying as if asleep or pacing up and down the inner wail.

'Welcome to the Pinion Inn,' came a laconic voice from the far wall. 'What law did you break to earn a holiday here?'

A thickset, middle-aged woman stepped forward, arm outstretched. 'Name's Clothier.

Yours?'

Leith shook her hand - or, more accurately, she shook his. Firmly. 'I'm Leith, from the north,'

he squeaked.

Laughter came from nearby. 'Don't mind Ma Clothier!' The speaker turned out to be an acne-scarred youth, hardly older than Leith. 'Mine's Lennan. Come and meet the family.'

Over the next few hours he got to know 'the family' well as they traded stories. Fifteen people were crammed into an area slightly smaller than the Widuz cell Leith had shared with Phemanderac. Ma Clothier had been there the longest; at least six menses by her reckoning.

'And it'll be a lot longer too,' she growled. 'None of my children care where I am. Even if they did, they couldn't afford to get me out.'

'What are you here for?' Leith found himself warming to this woman and her 'family'.

'No idea.' She shrugged. 'They grabbed me on the street, then pow! Here I am.'

'Stole her weight's worth of jewellery from Tower Market,' Lennan whispered. 'She's the scourge of the city.' Respect for the broad-shouldered woman, tinged with something approaching love, filled his voice. Leith nodded.

'How about you?' Several curious faces turned his way.

The Archivist trimmed the candle as Phemanderac reached for the volume with the great blue wave on the cover. 'Pyrinius was right, the old fool,' he whispered. 'He always said the Wave volume contained the Domaz Skreud. Here,' he said, calling his companion over. 'Listen to this,' and he read:

Above those who fled the fire in the east

Stood a snowfkcked fence; the skyline did it stain.

A fertile land and free lay sheltering beneath

White-walled rock flights floating o'er the plain.

The people of the Vale claim this verdant land

Where the history of hope may begin again.

The once proud upraised ramparts are no more.

The timeless towers tumbled to the ground.

Behind the fallen lichen-covered walls

No songs or careless laughter now abound.

Of the mountains and the sea and the strong-walled tower,

Of the pride-pillars three, only two can be found.

'It's a fragment of a lament, a song no doubt composed on the long march north and west to Faltha. These lines must have been added: after the First Men left the Vale. They may even have been written here, in this very building. It destroys every theory held by scholars since the Five Books were first lost. It appears, rather than being complete before the destruction of the Vale, the Ten Books were still being written after Faltha was settled. But how could books still being written refer to the contents of other books authored, at least in part, thousands of miles away?' He looked up, puzzled. 'Either the First Men who left the Vale and those of the House of Rehtal who remained behind had a much greater degree of contact than anyone imagined, or - or it would explain what Hauthius wrote about mind-sharing. Mind-sharing! Pyrinius always maintained Hauthius was far saner than most of the other scholars who sat in judgment on him.'

He laughed, oblivious of the fact that the Archivist could not possibly know to whom he referred. 'They called Pyrinius the new Hauthius, and perhaps he was, perhaps he was.

'This is a book to be savoured. It is too late in the evening to commence study on it now. Such treasures! It might be years before I leave this place.' He closed the book almost reverently, then picked up the final volume, easing the dry pages apart with the caress of a lover.

As the minutes lengthened to hours and the hours stretched away into the night, Phemanderac pored over this last volume, the Book of the Golden Arrow, with the Archivist at his side. It was indeed a book of law, but a kind of law unguessed by the scholars and moralists of Dhauria. There were no legal requirements, no dates, times or amounts to be adhered to, no system of government based on the visible externalities of life such as existed in Faltha - and Dhauria - now. All discussion within the pages seemed based on the premise that the ultimate goal of humankind was to dwell together in unity, and every law was subservient to this goal.

For Phemanderac, who specialised in the study of the evolution of moral codes, the book was a revelation, an explosion of light that left him breathless. We were taught to set one day a month aside to honour the Most High, a day on which no work was to be done. But here it explains that the Workless Day is called Today; that we enter the Workless Day by resting from our own attempts to fulfil the moral code. So we fulfil the law every day, not once a month, by not trying to fulfil the law!

He read on. Teachers in his own land regularly expounded the virtues of making offerings to the memory of the great Fountain. In fact, many insisted on a regular tithe, the Teogothian it was called, levied on the villagers and used to support the teachers and scholars themselves.

But here it says that the heart is bound by the tithe, but loosed by the gift freely given. Who could have guessed this? Have we completely misinterpreted the nature of the Most High?

Are we worshipping some other god - or our own good deeds?

His mind groped on the fringes of understanding. The cold heart seeks to placate its gods with outward things, offering sacrifices, parading its goodness in public and then retreating to its private darkness. But here the fire-warmed heart rejects the bare bones of legislation in favour of attitudes inherited from the Most High, which then work their way out to the surface.

Dhauria was without doubt the most civilised place in the world, a fact confirmed by Phemanderac's travels. What happens in this city would not be tolerated in my homeland. Yet according to this book we of Dhauria have been completely wrong! Our laws prohibit murder, yet do nothing about hate; punish adultery, ;yet condone betrayal; flay the skin, yet leave the heart untouched. We are no different to the Falthans or, indeed, the Bhrudwans, for that matter. Perhaps we're worse, living smug lives of dedication and service, our cold hearts undisturbed by the requirements of the law.

He looked again at the cover of this book that left him stunned. The Golden Arrow. The power of the Most High to be good; to be righteous, fired from his bow, piercing the skin of human endeavour, enflaming the human heart. He lifted the precious book from the bench, his own heart beginning to burn. I am tired of the laws that wrap themselves around my ankles like seaweed, drowning me with their lies, turning acts of love into mere acts of duty. What have we done to ourselves; oh, what have we done?