Gods of Earth (7 page)

“And who will feed Seth? Who will care for him?”

He dropped the handfuls of Earth and reached out and clutched fiercely in desperate fists the fur on the back of the coyote’s neck. He pulled Seth close, almost falling into him. The coyote put his head under Chance’s chin and closed his sad, knowing eyes.

The Guardian stared down at the weeping boy. Slowly his hands rose, as if to reach for the boy, and then fell again. He opened his mouth, ready to demand that Chance follow him, but no words came out. His gray cheeks twitched.

Only fifty days before, the Guardian had been wakened when he sensed the god. Before that, he had not moved in two eons, had not breathed in five hundred years. Where he had stood in a forgotten cavern, deep in a forsaken land, his slate-gray skin had petrified as his feet had grown, like stalagmites, into the limestone floor. And when he first felt the god, for one human moment he had longed to remain in the forgetful dark and let the lime continue to wrap him in stone. But the Old Gods had chosen him well: even after long centuries, he did not desert his duty to kill the god.

And so he had tried, as he walked the surface again, to bring the cave with him, to wrap himself in the cool indifference of the ages, his thoughts fixed to purposes as old and heartless as the rising of mountains.

But a terrible struggle raged within the Guardian now. He could see the Earth with the eyes of an ancient thing, where mortal lives flitted by, and the fall of a maple seed, the leap of a fish, an avalanche of stones, and the death of a father were all ordinary, brief events among endless events. Or, he could feel the pull of life, like the noisy, driving vortex of the river behind them as it fell over rapids. The fleeting cares of this boy threatened to sweep him away. He could be drawn down and whelmed in the hopes and sorrows of the living—seized by the concerns of a boy not unlike the son he had once raised and lost. Long, long before.

The Guardian had to choose between those worlds.

Slowly, the Guardian dragged one foot forward. He paused again, his shaking hands held out uncertainly. Chance pressed his face still against the coyote’s neck.

Then the Guardian reached up to his throat and undid the clasp on his cloak. It slipped off his shoulders to hang in his fist, revealing his head for the first time that day. He swung the tattered gray cloak around Chance and laid it over the boy’s shoulders. He put his hand on Chance’s head.

“I am sorry, Puriman,” he whispered. His voice sounded, for the first time in many centuries, like a human voice. “I am sorry for your loss.”

And the boy wept, in gasping, choking sobs, for the miseries that mortality makes of human life.

CHAPTER

7

A
fter Chance and the Guardian returned to the fire by the boat, the Guardian rebuilt it to a tall, crackling flame. As he worked, Chance sat against a fallen tree and asked him, “What about Sarah?”

“The woman he took?”

“Is she safe? And my brother?”

“Most likely she is safe,” the Guardian said. He sat down on the moss-covered fragment of a tree trunk, across the fire from Chance. Seth curled at Chance’s feet and peered up warily at the Guardian.

“You told me you don’t have a dog,” the Guardian said.

Seth’s ears snapped up with indignation. His tail slapped the ground once. “I-I-I am not a dog,” he protested. “I’m a coy-coyote.”

The Guardian grunted.

Seth laid his chin back down on his crossed paws. “Soulburdened rock,” he mumbled. Chance and the Guardian both pretended not to hear that as they stared at the flames.

After a few minutes, the Guardian asked, “Did the bear speak the truth? Do men hunt the woodwardens?”

Chance hesitated. “The soulburdened? We Purimen do not hunt them. Though our Rangers turn away the bears and large soulburdened, and discourage the others from coming to our lands. I know of no Trumen that hunt them. But… I hear from Trumen that many other men hunt them. Especially in the north.”

The Guardian scowled.

“You spoke to them first in a guild language,” Chance added. “Was it Leafwage?”

“I spoke in Lifweg, yes.”

“And Seth knows it,” Chance whispered. The coyote said nothing, nor lifted his head, but looked up at Chance through his brows, giving him a sweet, pathetic expression. Chance ran his hand over Seth’s head, then tugged at the thick fur on the back of his neck. The coyote had explained, as they stumbled back to the camp, that he had confronted the pale unman the night before, and had been cast aside with a wave of the hand that held the eye. Knocked unconscious, Seth had awakened in the morning and found the croft empty. He had immediately set off to seek Chance. How the coyote knew in which direction to follow, Seth did not explain; Chance assumed he had followed a scent.

“All the woodwardens spoke Lifweg when last I walked the Earth,” the Guardian said.

“Are you in the Leafwage?”

“The cursed Guild? That Guild was smitten long ago. Their leader Treow, the First Knight, lost sway of the guild, then walked into the great wood, and was never seen again. Each of the other knights was murdered by the Theogenics Guild, the Orderlies, the Dark Engineers. In the end by the gods. Hunted by all.”

Chance heard bitterness in the Guardian’s answer. He asked a different question. “What was that thing that… attacked us?”

The Guardian frowned. “It is a shard of a god. One of the seven Younger Gods, perhaps. Or so it seems. Why it craves you I do not know.”

“The False Gods were all destroyed,” Chance said. “The True God ordained that they would destroy each other, as would many false men, in wars and strife wrought of their pride.”

The Guardian fixed his pale eyes on Chance a long time, seeming to weigh whether to answer him. Finally he said, “I cannot guard you and your beliefs, Puriman. One must be hurt.” He leaned back.

“There were seven human gods. An old lay told of this; perhaps somewhere men sing it still.” The Guardian surprised Chance by chanting softly,

Five were the demigods,

First of men with numinous power:

Threkor, Arvang, Wervool, Jeet, and Kane.

Seven were the children gods,

First with otherworldly flesh,

And Threkor forged in his black fires

Seven jars to bind them.

“Two of the gods went missing even before the beginning of the Theopolemein, what some others have called the Theomachia, and yet others call The War Against the Gods.”

“The War Against the False Gods,” Chance said.

“So Purimen call it, then. This must be a bit of one of those two lost gods. Eating the soul and flesh of a man.”

“The eye,” Chance whispered. Seth whimpered.

“The eye,” the Guardian agreed.

“How can an eye be… any danger?”

“Each bit of the Earthly body of human gods has all of its soul. It is a bitter and bewildering bane for it to be broken into parts. It may not know who or what it is. But each withdrawn shred could become the whole god.”

“Is it looking for the rest of itself?”

The Guardian shook his massive head slowly. “It seeks you, and you are not the rest of it. I think only the eye abides.”

“Can anyone fight it?”

“I could easily rend the man, and make the god near harmless for a short time. But I will need help to bind it.”

Chance picked up a stick and poked the fire. Sparks leapt and climbed the smoke. “But in the barn.…”

“I did not use my full strength, and we had only just begun to fight. Such a clash can wreck, in a wide ground, space and the things in it. I did not want to kill the many Purimen there. Perhaps I should have waged full havoc. Now the god grows stronger with time, as all the gods did.”

A moth fluttered around Chance’s head. He brushed it away. “What did it do to Sarah and Paul?”

“It moved them—” The Guardian hesitated. “I do not ken the words in Common Speech. But the god closed them… in another space. I could have opened it, but I might have killed them if the god thwarted me.”

Chance nodded, though nothing that the Guardian said had any clear meaning for him.

“And you believe she… they will be safe?”

“For a short while, Puriman. It seems the god wants you. They are a way to get you. Dead, or harmed beyond hope, the god won’t have this use for them.”

“I have to help Sarah. And my brother. As soon as I can.”

The Guardian nodded. “We will speak with the Guild Mothers of the Gotterdammerung. If we bind this god, or if you are no longer useful to it, then you may go back to your hearth. But you need know, Puriman, that you, this woman, your brother—these are not the only lives in danger.”

Chance frowned at the fire. The right sense of all this heretical talk eluded him. It was all blasphemous, the kind of evil that the Elders often cautioned thrived among the lost men. The worst
warnings of The Book were coming true before his eyes. Part of him felt reassured, even comforted in his faith, because he saw that the Purimen were right in their cautions. But these evils also seemed to reaffirm his people’s creed that a Puriman should play no part in these things. He should turn his back. He should refuse to hear or speak of these things.

But for Sarah and Paul. To do nothing would be to abandon them, if the Guardian told the truth.

“And are you a.…” Chance hesitated, not wanting to say “false god.” “Were you made with their powers, by men?”

“I was not made by men.”

“Then are you,” and Chance almost whispered now. “Are you an Erthengle? A fallen angel, one of God’s fallen host?”

“No. I was a man like you once. And that is all I will say of this.”

Chance stared at the fire a long time before he spoke again. “If helping you will help Sarah and Paul, then I will help you. I have responsibilities. Things that I must do. The burial of my father. And mother. A croft that may now depend on me. Vines that need constant tending. But I will help you. To save Sarah, and to save Paul, and so that I can return to the vincroft and try to take back my life there.”

The fire crackled. The night had cooled, even though there was no wind. The scratch on his arm, which he had cleaned and wrapped with a scrap of his ruined coat, stung as he shifted closer to the flames. But the wholesome smell of the hardwood smoke heartened him. He drew the Guardian’s cloak tighter around himself and breathed deeply the homely scent.

Seth pushed himself closer to Chance.

“Let us hurry, then,” Chance added. “We have to hurry. For Sarah’s sake.”

“We will come where this river falls closest to Disthea in another two days. Then we must walk, or find another means, over land. That will take another three days, perhaps. Now sleep, if you can.”

“I’ll need to eat,” Chance said.

Seth yipped. “Food,” he said.

“We’ll find food tomorrow,” the Guardian told them.

Chance got up onto his knees. He turned his back and bowed his head to pray. His lips moved but he was silent as he thought, “Oh God, please watch over Sarah and Paul and keep them safe from this false god. God, please grant grace to my mother and father who were good and kind people who took a poor orphan boy into their home and raised him as their own and got nothing for it in this world but instead suffered and.…” This caused a heavy lump to rise in his throat, and quickly he closed down that thought and repeated to himself, “God, please keep Sarah and Paul safe. Amen. Amen.”

Then he lay down, folding the hood under his head as a pillow. Seth curled against him. He watched the firelight play on the immobile gray hands of the Guardian.

When he felt calm again, Chance said, quietly, as he petted the back of Seth’s head, “There’s one other thing. One other reason I want to help. I want to avenge my parents.”

The Guardian narrowed his eyes, watching Chance closely.

“The True Book tells that revenge and vengeful thoughts are sins,” Chance explained. “But only against people. Against an enemy of God, against a false god, the True God asks that we be justly vengeful. I want to avenge this wrong. For my father.”

The Guardian nodded slowly. “I know nothing of a greatest god, nor of your holy book, nor even of grapes and wine and Purimen funerals. But an earned wrath, Puriman,
an earned wrath
—this I understand.”

CHAPTER

8

“W
ake,” the Guardian said. Chance sat up. The Guardian peered out into the forest, his back to Chance. Seth stood erect next to Chance, ears bent forward, and sniffed the air.

“What is it?” Chance rose uneasily. Cramps knotted his left arm and leg, where he had lain on the cold ground. His stomach pained him with hunger. His headache had returned with a fierce intensity.

“Something comes.”

“What?”

The Guardian did not answer. Behind them, birds sang loudly with their morning calls, but before them the forest fell silent.

The wood was ancient here. It retained the last of the summer’s lush and green foliage, but the towering trees held the thick canopy high above. The morning light sloped in under the treetops, gold over the green fronds of the ferns covering the floor. It shimmered on the millions of white spider threads bridging the underbrush.