| ONE The day Yhoshi and O'ric arrived in Pre Tena'aa began much like all the other days that had passed since our Circle of Bards straggled into this remote land. Rising before dawn, we slipped silently through the labyrinth of underground passageways and out into the gray, timeless time between night and day. We gathered in a circle, all twelve of us around Eulisha, following the line of her oak staff as it traced a north-south arc through the sky and then paused. It lingered there, on a spot just above the horizon, where a faint shadow-streaked orb fluttered into view then dissolved. "We send the strength of our hearts to M'nor that she may return to light in joy and truth," Eulisha said. We touched our right hands from heart to mouth and repeated the refrain. No other sound broke the early morning still. Only when spikes of pink and white speared the gloom did we break circle and file back inside. Danger rose with the suns. Little traveled though Pre Tena'aa was, we were outlaws. Though we didn't officially exist, there was a price on our heads — heads King Fvorag craved as the crowning display on his Wall of Traitors. No one knew we were here and had been for seven years. No one, save the Tena'aa themselves, and their fabled ferocity kept visitors, including the King's Men, at bay. Legend proclaimed them man-eaters, asserted that the suns-bleached bones heaped along the highway and picked clean of all flesh were all that remained of any who strayed from the road that pierced this barren land like an arrow. In truth, the Tena'aa ate no flesh, only the roots and herbs that flourished in their darkened tunnels and the scratchy grains that swept out across their treeless prairie. Yet their culinary magic transformed these into such incomparable flavors that I was always first inside their cavernous dining hall at mealtime. This day was no exception. I raced down the familiar route and took my place at our table just as a Tena'aa server set a steaming bowl of puna porridge in front of me. Often, Gwill'm, the Tena'aa chief, or his brother Heraff joined us for meals. This morning, however, we thirteen bards sat alone, freeing Zakk to resound a familiar theme. "You must be tired, mother. Let me work with the boy today." My father's younger brother forced his thin lips into a smile of forced charm that fluttered between sneer and servility. His eyes squeezed into colorless slits that flicked from Eulisha's face to mine. Eulisha and Zakk had taken over my bard-teaching from my father and tutor, both missing these nine years and believed dead. Eulisha shook her head. She was my grandmother and Elderbard, a title that once ranked alongside the king in importance. At least four score and ten, she smiled with the face of a dried apple, the heart of a child and the laugh of a wind chime rippling in a summer breeze. She laughed now, good-naturedly. But her mien was firm. "No, son. Your work with Toshar is done." The solicitous shading faded from Zakk's voice. "I am Am'dar's brother. I am to be Elderbard when you—" Catching himself, he reshaped his scowl into something almost genial. "I am to be next Elderbard. It is right that I take over all the boy's education." He silently canvassed the table for support, but only his wife, Myrrym, acknowledged him. "The boy is no longer a boy," Eulisha chided gently. "He's a young man. A young man with a name. Why do you never call him by it?" Zakk glowered at me. "A young man?" he spat. "Look at him." Zakk's gray eyes bore into me with unprecedented malice and I flinched as though I had been struck. "You see why I call him 'boy'? A man wouldn't cower like a wounded fahriya. If he is ever to be a man, he needs a man to teach him what that means. He needs—" "Zakk." Eulisha's voice was chill as ice. "I am still Elderbard. I will decide who teaches him and when." Zakk's eyes flared. He opened his mouth, then shut it again. Clenching his fists, he jerked his shoulders back and stormed from the hall. And so another breakfast and another quarrel made way for another morning's lessons with Eulisha. If one day in Pre Tena'aa was much the same as the last, my time with Eulisha was always magically unique, alive with storytelling and song as I absorbed the history and lore that all bards must learn and pass on. "As the youngest surviving bard, you have a special responsibility to learn and remember," she said as I prepared to leave her chamber at midday. I hesitated at the door. "What is it, Toshar? What have you been waiting to ask?" "Are there other stories, Grandmother? Ones you and Zakk haven't taught me? Ones not yet written?" It was a question Zakk had answered the previous day — with his usual cuff to the back of my head. "What does your heart tell you?" Eulisha asked in turn. I started to shrug, my customary response to this question, but then sensed an unusual stirring, the faintest glimmer of an inner knowing. It seemed as though a butterfly had landed in my chest, its wings beating in time with my heart. It unsettled me, igniting a spark of fear. But I wanted to please Eulisha, so I listened and pushed and probed, my face contorted with purpose. "Don't impose your will on it, Toshar. Let it come as it comes. Free your breath." I exhaled — more sigh than surrender — then shook my head in defeat. I felt nothing, saw nothing, knew nothing. "You will know what is yours to know when it is time to know it," Eulisha whispered. She stood so close I could smell her sweet-scented soap, the one that always reminded me of my mother. I swallowed hard, trying to hold back the tears, trying to be the man Zakk demanded I be. "You will know the stories that are yours to know at the same time," she added. "Until then, be still and have patience." Patience: always difficult counsel for one on the cusp of manhood. I left Eulisha's chamber and wandered blindly through dark tunnels eerily lit greenish gold by the phosphorescent maya weed that climbed their earthen walls. I walked, ignoring the call to lunch, ignoring the call to chores. I walked until my legs ached and I no longer knew where I was. All the while I sought the return of that butterfly, only to push it away whenever it approached. Day and night are much the same beneath the earth, where time has no meaning and the shadowy glow of maya never alters. Only when a commotion erupted around me did I discover how long I had wandered. From all directions, Tena'aa scurried past and up a ramped shaft to the surface. Curious, I followed. To my surprise, daylight had fled and Aris blazed defiantly in the northern sky. With lesser stars it formed a web of twinkling diamond chips that glinted off the luminous fangs of the Tena'aa. It was easy to give credence to the legends of their ferocity. It was said, Gwill'm had told me, giggling, that the play of starlight on their giant teeth lured travelers off the road to what seemed to be a settlement, only to be eaten alive, their bones heaped by the road. It was a myth the Tena'aa encouraged, he said. It kept them safe in perilous times. So I was surprised to see two travelers emerge from the shadows, following a snaking, tooth-lit course through the scrub. It could be a treacherous route, even in daylight, because of the camouflaged air shafts and entryways that pocked the landscape. One traveler rode a dappled mount, the other sat atop a wooden coach drawn by two horses. These were not King's Men. Though that fact alone didn't mark them as friends, I knew them to be such. I knew and saw much, even as the dim starlight revealed little: the curious rune-like markings on the coach...the even curiouser horses that drew it, whose names I knew (without knowing how) to be Rykka and Ta'ar, the ancient words for dawn and dusk. But for the white bolts that flashed from forehead to muzzle, Rykka's coloring was the pale blue of morning sky, Ta'ar's the smoky plum of twilight. Neither bridle nor reins secured them to the coach or to the most curious piece of all: the driver, who sat upon a three-legged stool perched at the front of the coach's flat roof, clawed hands folded on his lap. He was clad in a hooded robe of deep forest green that hid all but his eyes. Yellow and unblinking, they ignored his horses' progress. Instead, they scanned our wonderstruck group until they found me. Only then did he pull back his cowl to reveal his face. Bald and clean-shaven, his skin was neither smooth nor wrinkled, neither light nor dark. It had a translucent scaliness, as though it could flake off at the touch. Ancient, yet ageless and ethereal: That's how O'ric seemed in those first moments. His companion, who I would soon know as Yhoshi, was near to my age and wore dun-colored garments that hung loosely on a muscular frame. He had bristly blond hair and a brush of platinum on his upper lip and chin that had the opposite of its intended effect on a face that was resolutely cherubic. Sea-blue eyes, hooded with suspicion, darted warily as he passed me. It was strange to see so clearly in so little light, but I didn't question it. I just watched. And listened to the faint strains of music that wafted toward me from O'ric's coach. At last they stopped, only to be instantly surrounded by a circle of flinting, glinting teeth. Panicked, Yhoshi heel-kicked his horse. It turned and turned again as he sought a way through the ring of tightly linked arms. All the while O'ric gazed calmly in my direction. Despite the dark, I knew he saw me as clearly as I saw him. Finally, shoulders slumped, Yhoshi brought his horse to O'ric's side. Nothing stirred, Yhoshi's fidgeting the only movement in the stone-like tableau. Even Rykka and Ta'ar, their necks bent over the grass, suspended their chewing. Then, as if acting on a signal from O'ric that only he could detect, Gwill'm stepped forward, the circle closing in behind him. He stood motionless for some minutes more and even I, who knew his gentleness, was struck by the savage aspect he presented. Little taller than a child, his tiny head was a mountain range of warts and moles dominated by a glistening glacier of teeth and two lakes of fiery, unlidded eyes. His right arm, three times the length of his left, belted his waist in a snakelike coil that culminated in three crooked fingers that themselves ended in a hook of claws. In place of a nose and ears, forked, twig-like antennae protruded from dark holes in his skull, their tips quivering. "Welcome," he said at last, bowing first to O'ric then to Yhoshi. "Welcome to the land of the Tena'aa. And to you, my friend—" he uncoiled his preternaturally long arm and extended it upward to O'ric "— most special greetings. It has been too many dark moons since we have seen you." O'ric nodded in reply, finally turning his gaze from me. He grasped Gwill'm's claw and stepped down as Gwill'm wrapped his lengthy arm around O'ric in a Tena'aa embrace. "M'nor has called," he said to Gwill'm, even as one yellow eye wandered back to me. "The time is now." Read more... |
