Kirith Kirin (The City Behind the Stars) (84 page)

Of the remaining three and a half million of the Jisraegen and Anyn peoples who never came to Arthen, by the end of the hundred years of the war, the Kellyxa and Vyddn plains could count scarcely one hundred thousand souls. A scant twenty thousand were to be counted in the north, though these numbers were increased when another twenty thousand refugees returned from the Svyssn and Tervan countries to the ruins of their family lands, their devastated towns and villages.

The numbers of the Drii dropped, too, but not as drastically, to one hundred fifty thousand. Most Drii who died were killed in the various armies, which swelled to unheard of sizes in the later stages when the Tervan and Svyssn had joined the war. At one point there were two hundred thousand troops afield in the Fenax and the north Kellyxa, and many of these died in battle against Drudaen. Worst hit of all were Drudaen’s servants, the Verm, of whom merely ten thousand lived through the devastation of shadow and war.

How many people were killed in fighting and how many Drudaen killed himself in order to prolong his life is a matter over which scholars still debate in the Praevenam and the Yneset, both of which we have revived in recent years. It is a matter of concern to nearly everyone, for Drudaen touched nearly everyone with the destruction that he brought. How many members of our families will we find in Zaeyn and how many never made the crossing because he sucked their souls into himself? What has happened to his spirit since? Did he cross the Gates like anyone else? Or did Kentha meet him at that last moment because she had prepared another place for him?

I have never tried to know the answers to these questions, any of them. The why of Drudaen will always puzzle us. He was already long-lived, his magic gave him nothing more than he had already, and yet somehow the use of magic enraged him, or sickened him, or changed him, or all those things. The ones who live a long time face such possibilities, as we know from history. The sickness passes, or not. I believe it did pass with Drudaen by the end, but it was too late, he could no longer stop making the shadow that kept him alive.

Less is said of Athryn’s place in the causes of the war, due to her conduct at the end of it. But when YY took her, there were not many who were sorry to see her go.

Many cities were destroyed in that war and never were rebuilt. Cordyssa vanished in the late stages of the conflict, and its ruin still sits on the mountain. Bruinysk was destroyed and never rebuilt. Genfynnel has become a park, and the only structure standing on the acropolis at the fork of the river is Laeredon Tower. Teryaehn was never resettled. Arroth was abandoned, and remained so for many years after the peace. Arsk was sacked and razed and rebuilt during the war. Kursk was left a husk but partly rebuilt afterward. Charnos and Ivyssa suffered reductions in population as people abandoned the cities for the countryside or were taken to slave camps in Antelek, where the Verm were trying frantically to farm in order to stave off starvation themselves. Teliar was abandoned during the war though people moved back there, later, and I bought Brun’s house by Ithambotl the great Anyn architect for myself. Kirith Kirin and I stayed there many times while he was King.

Mordwen Illythin was too old for fighting, Kirith Kirin never allowed him to take part in any of the combat, but he kept a long account of the war that has become the standard text on all that happened after the Battle of Aerfax. By the close of the war, Mordwen had reached the end of the long life granted him, and he would have gone of his own accord into the Deeps, except he wanted to stay to see how the story came out, he said; we were saying good-bye, that last day, before YY took him with her. He gave me his books to keep, because I was the one who would be here longest.

Pel Pelathayn and Ren Vael died in the last fighting at Cordyssa, when Drudaen loosed Verm soldiers into the place and told them to do whatever they wished with the people who were left, to take whatever goods they could find, him having by then no other way to feed them or reward them, his gold worthless like everything else. The Verm killed the men and women of fighting age, raped the young ones and beat the old ones, sacked the city and burned it to the ground. Drudaen stayed back from the fighting though he saw to it that Ren and Pel were targeted and killed. So he has the deaths of those two on his head, too; but they died fighting and passed safely through the gates, as far as we know.

My uncle Sivisal lived a long time but never married; when he died he was still serving Kirith Kirin in Arthen. He caught a cold that turned to pneumonia, not the death he would have chosen but the one he got. Since he had left no family I had none. The war proved to be the last gasp of the Clans, which were never much remembered afterward; sad to say, I suppose, since the Clans first appeared in the age of the Forty Thousand.

Brun stayed in Arthen at court until Theduril went south to fight in the Novris resistance; Brun had first met him in that city and returned there with him. She died in the early fighting and Theduril in the late. When I heard she had finally married him, though, I felt a sense of ease for her. I missed her oddly in after years.

Trysvyn died at the gates of Bruinysk when the Verm were besieging that city. She came from there, and gave her life there. Gaelex the Marshall died of old age in Inniscaudra. So too died Inryval, Thruil the groom, my old tutor Kraele, Theduril, Fethyar, Unril, Idhril, Vaeyr, Kaleric, Duvettre, the clerks I knew. So died Axfel, cared for by Mordwen to the end, though Mordwen had never liked the dog.

Nemort died in the north Fenax in one of the early campaigns against the Verm. He remained loyal to Kirith Kirin to his death.

My mother’s body perished in the explosion that consumed Senecaur. She herself had been dead a long time, or so I choose to believe, and it was only her body that was re-animated by Drudaen as his weapon against me, though in the end she hurt him more, that day.

I suppose it is safe to say that all those I knew would have died anyway, given that I slept for so long, except the Jhinuuserret. But one’s later friends never feel quite the same.

The Law of Changes, under which Kirith Kirin and Athryn Ardfalla had exchanged the crown for thousands of years, ended when Athryn left the world. We believed that when YY came this time she would end the current age of the Jisraegen as well, but she prolonged it, for one last long afternoon of peace, she said. For she trusted Kirith Kirin to make a peace that would last a while, and so he did.

Years after peace had begun, when the work of rebuilding and restoring had been going on in earnest for a long time, we traveled to Mykinoos as Kirith Kirin had promised we would one day. He had been buying the land around my father’s old farm from whoever had claim to it after the war. This had taken a while since it was a long time before such claims could all be sorted out, work he had a hand in himself. But in the end he assembled a park he named Aneseveroth, Sea of Circles, and he took me there when the new stone lodge had been finished to his satisfaction.

He had bought land right up to the Mykinoos square; the village had survived the war as a shell but was repopulated in the boom of trade that accompanied rebuilding. Kirith Kirin’s current Marshal of the Ordinary Thumin had recruited settlers to return to Mykinoos along with all the legitimate claimants to the lands thereabouts who had survived. The gates of Aneseveroth were right at the center of the village, and the villagers were free to wander in the parks. Mykinoos has become a tourist site in latter days, because I was born there, and most folks think that Aneseveroth was my father’s farm. The real farmhouse, the real farmyard and barns, we made into a woody garden, working together during the summers we spent in the comfortable country house he had designed by the architect of the day. An imitation of Ithambotl, as all buildings are, in my opinion, but a nice house.

But that first day, no garden had been begun; there was only the high wall Kirith Kirin had commissioned to enclose the old farm grounds, and within was more than a century of growth, a hardwood forest all matured, and the remains of the life I remembered. We walked into it alone, Imral and Karsten back at the house, our guests for the opening of the park but not for this more private journey.

I stood there and took a breath. You could still see the shape of the land if you tried, overgrown as it was. I could almost see myself running back from the fields with Axfel and Jarred, the news of my uncle’s impossible visit ringing in my ears. I took a deep breath.

“You sent for me,” I told him, and took his hand, warm and comfortable, in mine. “To this place. And this is where it started.”

“For you,” he said.

“Yes, for me.”

We were quiet, wandering. Nothing to say, only a feeling of peace and completion that we could think of as something we had earned. By then we had been together a long time, and his thoughts were as comfortable to me as mine were to him.

“I can begin to think it was worth it,” he said. “To feel how peaceful this night is.” He meant more, of course; he meant that the crops were growing, and the Vermish changes were being wiped slowly out of people, and sunlight was falling over grass as it used to, and there were only the usual problems to deal with, like the Charnos Guild and the troublesome new navy. He meant he was happy to see a sense of the ordinary restored to Aeryn, and now that he knew the work was well begun, he could feel a sense of normalcy himself.

For me, standing there, I could agree with him, but I had nothing to add. To my family, for whom the beginning of my adventure marked the end of their lives, was our peace worth their suffering, their violent ends? One can’t weigh that kind of imbalance in a scale.

We began in those years and after to celebrate Chanii, in memory of the Long War and all that we lost in it. Kirith Kirin began the ceremony quietly when he dedicated the site of Genfynnel as a perpetual park; and after that, each year, the remembrance continued there and spread to other places. People of a certain age make a pilgrimage to the Laeredon acropolis and sleep the night in the park. Kirith Kirin said we should never forget that war, and we never have, while he was with us or after. We celebrate on the darkest day of winter, knowing that the suns that shine on us will renew the year again, as we ourselves renewed our world after its longest winter.

We have left the scar of Aerfax exactly as it was when Drudaen brought the fortress down. Of all the rooms in all the buildings in all the named places of Aeryn, I have never been back to that room, nameless, where I slept. Sometimes, even now, I dream I am still there, listening to the sea, and I am trying in the dream to wake myself, because the Wizard is still outside and I have to get rid of him, before he does any more harm. Finally I do wake up, into the real night, and if I’m in Inniscaudra I go to Ellebren Tower and sit on the High Place, and if I’m in Chalianthrothe I go to the room of the three circles. I listen to the music that is all there is, and I find peace again.

Acht: (AHKT) A ritual poison used by the Svyssn in the ceremonial death of the Husband.

Ae: (EYE) High; also, mountain; in some contexts, a people or nation

Aediamysaar: (Eye-dee-AM-i-sar) Mt. Diamysaar, the Mount of God's Sisters, site of a device used in magic, in Arthen

Aegul: (EYE-gul) The High Stair, linking Domren with the North Wall and the Deeps of Thenduril at Inniscaudra

Aelaren: (Eye-LAR-en) The High Walk, a stone bridge linking Evaedren with Idren at Inniscaudra

Aerfax: (AIR-fax) The fortress on the southern spur of the Black Spur Mountains; the High Place there is a Tower called Senecaur, but the name Aerfax is also often used for the Tower

Aeryn: (AIR-in) The kingdom outside Arthen

Ajnur, Battle of: (AJH-nur) The Battle fought between the Woodland Army and the Verm Army for control of and passage through Ajnur Gap; the story is told in Kirithmar

Amataxa: (Am-a-TAX-a) A region near Cordyssa

Amri: (AM-ree) The Venladrii girl who serves as kyyvi

An: (An) The sea

Aneseveroth: (An-e-SEH-ve-roth) The name given to Kinth's Farm after the long war

Angoroe: (An-GOR-oh) The passage between Arthen and the western mountains

Aniwetok: (An-i-we-TOK) The mayor of Charnos, one of the city burghers.

Anrex Valley: (AN-rex)A valley in the central Fenax where Kiril Karsten led troops who, with the aid of an army from Drii, encircled the Southern forces and massacred them.

Antelek River: (AN-te-lek)The river flowing between Lake Mur and Lake Dyvis, flowing beyond under the northern arm of Black Spur Mountains to become the Naug

Anykos: (An-EE-kos) The last month of the year

Anyn: (AN-in) The great bay in south Aeryn enclosed by the Black Spur Mountains and the Arossan Peninsula