The Fugitive Prince (Bell Mountain) (16 page)

Perkin wanted to camp atop the hill, the safest place for miles around, he said. Baby had had a very hard time climbing up with them—he wasn’t built for it—and needed rest.

“You’re quite a strider for your age, Majesty,” he added, “but you look like you could use a rest, too. And up here is the best place for it.”

Ryons found a patch of blackberries, which made a pleasing addition to their supper. Knowing this was no natural hill, it seemed odd to him that anything so nice and natural as blackberries should grow on it. And as they ate, and as the sun went down, Perkin told him a few stories from the New Books—how all the Empire was destroyed in a day, yet God preserved a remnant of all the nations so that the human race might live. Maybe it was the stories that inspired the dream Ryons had that night, or maybe not.

He lay awake on his back, looking up at all the stars, and didn’t realize he’d fallen asleep because he slid so easily into the dream, and it picked up where reality left off.

It began with him admiring the stars, and then all around him grew up tall, dark shapes like the trunks of impossibly gigantic trees. All was silent. Then lights began to appear within the shapes, lights as many as the stars, and even brighter: red and blue and green lights, too.

Ryons watched, amazed, as other lights appeared, lights that traveled silently, sedately, back and forth across the night sky. He looked harder and saw that some of those were lighted windows, like the windows of rich men’s carriages on the streets of Obann. But these carriages traversed the sky and needed no horses to pull them. He watched intently, and then he saw there were people inside the carriages, people calmly sitting as they were being carried through the sky. It was a wonderful thing to see.

The sky turned grey with the coming dawn, and Ryons could see the carriages themselves. They were as big as houses! Houses that flew like arrows …

And then, for no reason, it was suddenly on his lips to cry out a warning, to spring to his feet and wave his arms, and yell “Stop! Stop!”

But he was too late. In a single flash, as if the very sun had burst and gushed out all its light at once, it was all gone, lost, destroyed—

He was sitting bolt upright with a scream dying in his throat, and it was still the dark of night around him.

“Ryons! Wake up!” Perkin shook him by the shoulder.

“I am awake,” Ryons muttered. The campfire had gone out, but there was enough light from moon and stars to show Cavall on his feet with his head cocked, and Perkin, and Baby with a glint of starlight in his eye.

“You’ve had a bad dream,” Perkin said.

“It was awful!” Ryons answered and went on to tell him all about the dream. “It was so real,” he said. “It was like I really saw it. I never would have guessed that I was dreaming.”

“Maybe you did see something,” said Perkin. “They say you’re the descendant of King Ozias. He was a prophet. He composed the Sacred Songs. If you are what they say you are, then maybe the spirit of prophecy is in you, as it was in him. But I think you’ve had a vision of the Day of Fire.”

“But that was ages and ages ago!” Ryons cried.

“A prophet sees what God shows him. But don’t be afraid.” Perkin patted him on the knee. “It might’ve been a dream, and nothing more.”

But Ryons knew it wasn’t.

Chapter 19

An Appearance of Magic

In the woods around what was left of Silvertown, several miles from the city, Hlah found outlaws. At least the authorities in Silvertown said they were outlaws.

“Oh, we’re criminals, all right!” said a man named Uwain, who had been a reciter in the chamber house in Silvertown. Now he led a half-starved band of four men, five women, and three children. “That’s why there’s a price on our heads, waiting for some lucky traitor to collect it. We’re guilty of the crime of not bowing down to the thrice-accursed dog who calls himself First Prester.” He paused to spit on the ground. “And we’re guilty of the crime of not going peacefully into slavery. As you can see, we’re hardened criminals indeed.”

Dirty faces, ragged clothes, and hollow cheeks—that’s what Hlah saw. One of the women glared back at him.

“You’re an Abnak, or else I’ve gone blind,” she said. “Are you going to try to hand in our scalps?”

“Elva—” Uwain started to say; but Hlah forestalled him.

“You’ve nothing to fear from me,” he said. “Yes, I’m an Abnak. But I believe in God and I serve King Ryons, and my wife is Obannese. We live on the west slope of the mountains, north of here. There are many of us now, with hunters and warriors, too. I can bring you with me when I go back. You’ll be safe there. It’s not a very hard journey.”

“It might be, for the children,” Uwain said.

“But it might be better than just staying here and waiting for the Devil’s Prester to get his hands on us,” said another woman.

“Tell me about him,” Hlah said. “I’ve come here to scout this country for the king.”

“What king!” barked a man.

“The king that God has chosen,” said Hlah. “Tell me about this Devil’s Prester, and I’ll tell you all about the king. King Ryons is his name.”

They agreed to that. Their camp was no more than a few wobbly lean-tos in a clearing, with a circle of stones to hold the fire. They all sat down together, but Uwain’s people had no food to give their guest. Hlah gave the children the little bit of jerky he had in his pack. That made some eyes go wide, to see an Abnak do a thing like that. He thought of his father, Chief Spider: it would have popped his eyes, too. But Spider lived long enough to become a servant of God, so he wouldn’t have said it was a waste of food.

“First thing,” Uwain began, “the man is not a prester. Our prester was a saintly old man, Prester Yevlach. The Heathen killed him when they took the city.

“And then in the spring they built that fort inside the city, and the Heathens’ mardars went up and down the land proclaiming that there was a New Temple of the Lord out East somewhere—and a new First Prester here in Silvertown. And that we had all better obey the new First Prester because God was angry with Obann for burning down the Temple in the city, and that God had chosen the Thunder King to rule over us.” Uwain paused to make a face. “It pains me to repeat such filth,” he said.

“And filth it is,” said Elva, “and they killed a lot of people around here and forced most of the men into their road-building gangs. There weren’t many of us who escaped into the forest.”

“We’d rather die, and our children with us, than live as slaves to any heretic,” said one of the men.

“But who is he?” Hlah asked.

“He’s nobody,” said Uwain, “just a dirty traitor. His name is Goryk Gillow. I knew him slightly, when he was a captain in the city garrison. He spied for the Heathen, told them how they could get past our defenses. He’s been in their service ever since. He’s no more any kind of prester than you are. As to how the Heathen picked him for the job, who knows? I suppose they had to have somebody, and he was handiest to their purpose.”

Hlah thought he might have heard the name of Goryk Gillow once before, but he hadn’t. He wasn’t in Obann the two times Goryk went there as the herald of the Thunder King. But he would remember the name when he made his report to Baron Roshay Bault; and then King Ryons’ advisers would know what devilry was brewing in Silvertown, and who was brewing it.

“I think I’d better go back right away,” he said, “so that news of all these matters might be taken to the king as soon as can be.” But first he had to tell Uwain’s people all about King Ryons. Silvertown was a long way from Obann, and communications had been shattered by the war. Most of the people had not yet heard that Obann had a king.

When he told of the boy king riding to the city on the back of a great and awful beast whose like had never been seen by any living human being, or even imagined; and how the beast drove off the Heathen host even as it forced the city’s gates and set fire to the Temple; and how that mighty host was destroyed and scattered in a single hour—when he told the tale, one of the women cried out:

“Why, my old aunt had a dream about all that! She told us all about it, and she said it was all true and really happened; and we just thought she was crazy. She died a week later, poor thing. But what you told us was exactly how she dreamed it!”

Hlah nodded. He knew God had loosed the spirit of prophecy in these present days.

He told the refugees how God had miraculously restored, in the person of a slave boy, the ancient line of kings, of the blood of blessed King Ozias. Uwain nodded and wiped a tear from his eye.

“It’s all according to the Scriptures,” he said. “I think we can believe this good news—the best news that ever was in all my life.”

“But can we believe him, Reciter?” said one of the men.

“I do!” said Uwain. And so Hlah wound up with twelve hungry people to take back with him to safety in the north.

Wytt followed the dog’s scent across the plains; it was stronger than the boy’s. Sometimes he lost the trail, but he always picked it up again. One night, though, he lost it for longer than usual; and before he found it again, he found something else—a lot of big people standing around a fire, making loud and happy noises.

“What did they look like?” Ellayne asked. It was always hard to remember that Wytt didn’t pay much attention to what human beings looked like. If he knew how to shrug, he would have. But then Jack said, “Listen! I hear people singing.”

“It’s a hymn!” Ellayne said, marveling. Then Jack recognized the melody, too. They’d both helped sing it in the chamber house in Ninneburky, often enough.

“Who would be holding an assembly at night, out in the middle of nowhere?” Ellayne wondered.

“Let’s go see,” Jack said. There was nothing to fear: Heathen bandits wouldn’t be singing hymns.

Wytt did not want to go see; the noise of the singing disturbed him. And he disappeared into the tall grass rather than climb into Ellayne’s pack. The children didn’t stop to look for him. They knew he’d never stray very far away from them.

They found several dozen people, quite a large crowd under the circumstances, gathered around a roaring bonfire that lit up a good portion of the night. Waxbushes, Jack thought: they burn the brightest. The people sang in Obannese and looked Obannese. Nearby were parked several wagons with mules or oxen in harness.

It was bad manners to interrupt the singing of a hymn. But there was a woman on the edge of the throng, sitting on the ground: not singing, but trying to shake a pebble out of one of her boots, which she’d removed. Ellayne went right up to her and touched her shoulder.

“Pardon me, ma’am—but what’s happening?” she asked.

“Don’t you know a worship service when you see one?” was the answer.

“But out here, at night, and no chamber house?”

“We don’t have a prester for our chamber house,” said the woman. “Heathen killed him on his way home from Obann. Where are you from, girl, that you don’t know that? You can’t be from Caryllick.”

Ellayne shrugged. She hadn’t known that.

“I never heard of holding services at night, outdoors,” Jack said.

“It’s a special occasion,” the woman said; and then the hymn was finished, and she shushed them. Hastily she tugged her boot back on and stood up to watch and listen. Jack and Ellayne weren’t tall enough to see anything, but there were other children watching from atop the wagons, so they climbed up to join them.

“Good people of Caryllick, and the country round about—thank you for showing your faith by attending this assembly.”

The booming voice that spoke those words belonged to a little fat man who stood on a tree stump by the fire. His voice was several sizes too big for him, but he made good use of it.

“As you came here in peace,” he said, “be assured that you will go in peace, too, and soon be safe again inside the stone wall of Caryllick. But walls are no protection from the wrath of God; and it is God’s wrath that you have to fear.

“O wicked and ungodly nation, that burned the Temple of the Lord! That left it for the king of all the Heathen to build it up again! How can your prayers be heard, without the Temple and its presters? Who can intercede for you?”

He went on and on about the Temple, which he said King Ryons’ army and the people inside Obann City had destroyed. Jack and Ellayne knew that was a lie, but it seemed these people didn’t. Jack was afraid Ellayne would start yelling about it in that shrill, piercing voice she had when she was fighting mad, and that the congregation would beat them into powder for it. He grabbed her hand and squeezed it, hard.