The Will of the Wanderer Read online

  The Will of the Wanderer

  The Rose of the Prophet Book 1

  By Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman

  Introduction by Margaret Weis

  April 2006

  Tracy and I had just finished the Darksword books—an introspective, brooding series about one man’s struggle to rise from darkness into the light. We were considering what to do for our next work and the idea came to us that we wanted to have some fun, not be quite so serious. We would do a “wahoo” adventurous story that would be very different from anything we’d done before.

  At the time, Tracy and his wife, Laura, were reading the Arabian Nights stories and enjoying them immesensely. Tracy suggested it would be fun to do a series with an Arabian-like fantasy setting and thus the idea for this series, the Rose of the Prophet, came about.

  We did research on all things Arabian, from the food to the clothing to the history to the language, names, and the layout of the cities. Tracy developed a unique perspective on the gods and religion (and any relationship to a twenty-sided die is purely coincidental!). He came up with the idea that magic would be the province of women in this setting, which would give the women a power base and would also provide for interesting conflict when a medieval-era, Western-type male magic-user suddenly finds himself in what to him is a strange and bewildering environment.

  As usual, we had lots of fun working on this project. I remember one incident in particular. I’m accustomed, when working with Tracy, to write the characters into all sorts of terrible situations and then turning to him for help to save them. In this series, I had come to a part in which the wizard, Mathew, is captured by the enemy (I’ll be vague so as not to ruin the suspense for you!) and it occurred to me that these people would simply kill him. There was no reason for them to allow him to live. And, Mathew had to survive at this point!

  So I called Tracy and explained the problem. I suggested that perhaps Mathew knew something or he had something in his possession that would be so important to these people that they would not only let him live, but even help keep him alive. I had no idea what that could be, however.

  Tracy knew. He said that Mathew was carrying a crystal globe filled with water and inside were two fish. (Now, mind you, this fish bowl is in the desert!) I said, fine, what’s so special about these fish?

  Tracy refused to tell me. “Just make certain that nothing happens to them!” he warned me.

  So Mathew and I carried these fish through the desert for a good many chapters with neither of us having the slightest idea who or what they were, just both of us knowing they were crucial to the plot and that we couldn’t allow anything to happen to them.

  Both Tracy and I enjoyed working on the Rose of the Prophet. We gained insight into a culture vastly different from our own, an ancient culture with a proud heritage and tradition and one for which we both came to have a great respect.

  Foreword

  Look where you will, bold adventurer, for as far as the eye can see, there is nothing.

  You stand near the Well of Akhran, a large oasis located in the center of the great Pagrah Desert. This is the last water you will find between here and the Kurdin Sea, which lies to the east. The rest of the party, delighting in the first signs of life they have seen after two days of travel through rolling, empty dunes, revels in the shady greenness, lounging beneath the date palms, dabbling their feet and hands in the cool water that bubbles up from somewhere underground. You, however—by nature restless and wandering—are already tired of this place and pace about, eager to leave and continue your journey. The sun is dipping down in the west and your guide has decreed that you must spend the night riding, for no one crosses the stretch of desert to the east, known as the Sun’s Anvil, during the hours of daylight.

  You look to the south. The landscape unfolds before you, an endless expanse of windswept granite whose broad, brownish, reddish monotony is occasionally relieved by touches of green: the feathery-limbed tamarisk, the tall acacia, manshaped cacti, scrub pine, thorn trees, and clumps of a silvery-green grass (which your camels love to eat) that springs up in odd and unexpected places. Continue traveling to the southwest and you will enter the land of Bas, a land of contrast, a land of huge cities of vast wealth and primitive tribes, skulking on the plains.

  Glancing to the north, you see more of the same monotonous windswept land. But well-traveled as you are, you know that if you journey several hundred miles north, you will eventually leave the desert behind. Entering into the foothills of the Idrith Mountains, you follow a pass between the Idrith and the Kich ranges and arrive at a well-traveled highway built of wood over which rolls innumerable wagons and carts, all heading still farther north for the magnificent Kasbah of Khandar, the once-great capital city of the land known as Tara-kan.

  Irritably slapping your camel stick against your leg, you glance about to see that your guides are loading the girba, the waterskins, onto the camels. It is nearly time to leave. Turning to the east, you look in the direction you are to travel. The patches of green grow less and less, for that way lies the eerily singing, shifting white sands, known appropriately as the Sun’s Anvil. Beyond those dunes to the east, so it is told, is a vast and locked ocean-the Kurdin Sea.

  Your guide has informed you that it has another name. Among the desert nomads it was once known scornfully as the Water of the Kafir—the unbeliever—since they had never seen it and therefore assumed that it existed only in the minds of the city-dwellers. Any statement made within the hearing of a nomad that he believes to be a lie is received with the caustic remark, “No doubt you drink the Water of the Kafir as well!”

  You are sorry not to have seen any of these fierce spahi—the nomadic desert horse riders—for you have heard many tales of their daring and courage. When you mention this to your guide, he coolly replies that though you do not see them, they see you, for this is their oasis and they know who comes to its banks and who goes.

  “You have paid well for the privilege of using their water, Effendi.” Your guide gestures to where the servants are spreading out a fine blanket upon the sand near the banks of the lake, heaping it with gold and semiprecious gems, baskets of dates and melons brought from the cool lands to the north. “There,” he says in a low voice, pointing. “You see?”

  You turn swiftly. A tall sand dune to the east marks the beginning of the Sun’s Anvil. Standing upon that dune, silhouetted against the emptiness of the sky behind them, are four figures. They ride horses—even from this distance you can appreciate the magnificence of their animals. Their haiks—or head cloths—are black, their faces are shrouded in black masks. You wave to them, but they neither move nor respond.

  “What would have happened had we not paid their tribute?” you ask.

  “Ah, Effendi, instead of you drinking the blood of the desert, it is the desert who would be drinking your blood.”

  Nodding, you look back, only to see the dune is once more barren and empty. The nomads have vanished.

  Your guide hurries off, shouting at the servants, the sight obviously having disquieted him. Your eyes-aching from the glare of the sun off the sand-turn westward to find rest.

  Here a line of red rock hills thrusts abruptly out of the desert, looking as if some gigantic hand had reached down and dragged them up out of the ground. This is country you left two days ago and you think back on it fondly. Icy-cold streams meander through the hills, to finally lose their way in the hot sand. Grass grows in abundance on the hillsides, as do juniper trees, tall pines, cedar, willows, and bushes and shrubs of all description. Entering the hills was, at first, a welcome relief after traversing the desert land that lies between these foothills and the mountains of Kich. But yo
u soon found that the hills are—in their way—every bit as eerie and forbidding as the desert.

  Jagged cliffs of red rock, whose very redness is enhanced by the contrasting green of the trees, soar into the overcast skies. Gray-white clouds hang over them, trailing long wisps of rain that drag across the hilltops. The wind howls among the crags and crevices, the chill streams rush wildly over smooth rocks as though they know their destination is the desert and are trying in vain to escape their destiny. Occasionally, upon a hillside, you can see a patch of white that moves across the green grass in an odd, undulating, flowing motion-a flock of sheep being driven to new pasture by the sheepherding nomads who dwell in this region; nomads who—you understand—are distantly related to those you have just seen.

  Your guide hastens back with word that all is ready. You cast a final look about your surroundings and notice—not for the first time—the most unusual phenomenon in this strange landscape. Immediately behind you stands a small hill. It has no business being in the desert; it is sadly out of place and appears to have been left behind when the bigger hills ran off to play in the west. As if to further emphasize the hill’s incongruity, your guide has told you that a plant growing on this hill grows nowhere else in the desert, or in the world for that matter.

  Before you leave, you walk over to examine the plant. It is an ugly, lethal-looking species of cactus. Squat, with fat, bulbous, pointed-tip leaves, it sprouts slender needles that must leap out at their victim, for you swear that you do not go near the plant, yet you find—when you look down—the wicked-looking thorns sticking in the tops of your boots.

  “What is the name of this abhorrent cactus?” you ask, plucking out thorns.

  “It is called the Rose of the Prophet, Effendi.”

  “What a beautiful name for something so hideous!” you remark, astonished.

  Your guide shrugs and says nothing. He is a city-dweller, uncomfortable in this place and impatient to leave. You look again at the strange hill in the middle of the desert and at the even stranger plant growing on the hill—the ugly plant with the beautiful, romantic name.

  The Rose of the Prophet.

  There must be a story here, you think as you rejoin the waiting caravan.

  There is, fellow wanderer, and I—the meddah—will tell it to you.

  The Book of the Gods

  The universe, as everyone knows, is a huge twenty-faceted jewel that revolves around Sul, Truth, the center. The Jewel rotates on an axis that has Good at the top and Evil at the bottom. The twenty facets of the Jewel are made up of connecting triangles, each triangle sharing sides with four other triangles. The nexus of their sides—the points on the Jewel—number twelve and represent the twelve philosophies of Sul. The positive philosophies—Good (at the top), Mercy, Faith, Charity, Patience and Law—are balanced by the negative—Evil (at the bottom), Intolerance, Reality, Greed, Impatience, and Chaos. Each of the twenty Gods combines three of these philosophies to make up one facet of Sul. Thus each God reflects a different facet of the Center’s Truth.

  Five Gods at the top touch the axis of Good. These are the Gods of Light. Five Gods at the bottom touch the axis of Evil. These are the Gods of Darkness. Ten Gods exist in the middle, touching both Light and Darkness. These are the Neutral Gods.

  When the world of Sularin was first created, it glowed brightly in the universe because each God remained joined to his fellows and Truth’s Jewel shone as a single, brilliant planet in the heavens. Man worshiped all the Gods equally, speaking to them directly, and there was peace in the world and in the universe.

  But as time went by, each God began to focus only on his or her facet of the Truth, coming to see that particular facet as The Truth and pulling away from the others. The light of the Jewel became fragmented, starting to shift and vary among the Gods as they fought with each other.

  In order to increase his power, each God sought to outdo the others by showering blessings down upon his mortal worshipers. As mortals will, the more blessings they received, the more they sought. Men began to call upon the Gods day and night, demanding favors, boons, gifts, long life, wealth, fair daughters, strong sons, fast horses, more rain, less rain, and so forth and so on.

  The Gods became deeply involved in the petty, day-to-day affairs of mortal men on Sularin, and the universe began to suffer, for it is written in Sul that the Gods must look not upon the light of one sun as it rises and the darkness of one night as it falls but must see the rise of an eternity of suns and the fall of an eternity of nights. Because the Gods looked increasingly at the world and less at the heavens, the Jewel of Truth began to totter and wobble.

  The Gods were at a loss. They dared not offend their followers, or it would mean losing their own existence. Yet they had to get back to the business of keeping the universe in motion. To help with this problem, the Gods summoned forth the immortals. A gift from Sul to the Gods, the immortals were beings created in the image of the Gods and given eternal life, but not unlimited power. Divided up equally among the Gods, these immortal beings had originally been performing the task of greeting the deceased after their departure from Sularin and escorting them to the Realms of the Dead.

  “From now on, however,” said the Gods to the immortals, “you will be the ones who must listen to the bleating and whining and incessant ‘I want’s of mortal man. You will deal with those wants that are within your power to provide—gold, jewels, horses, assassinations, and so forth. Other matters more difficult to arrange, such as marriages, babies, and rainfall, you will continue to bring to us.”

  The immortals were delighted with this new service; the Realm of the Dead being, as one might imagine, an extremely dull and boring place. The Gods, in vast relief, began to distribute their share of immortals as each God thought best.

  As the nature of the Gods differed, so did the nature of the immortals and their workings among men. Some of the Gods feared that the immortals might become as great a nuisance as man himself, while others desired to protect their immortals from the follies and vagaries of man. These Gods established a hierarchy of immortals, assigning the lower echelon to act as emissaries to ones above.

  For example, the immortals of Promenthas—God of Goodness, Charity, and Faith—instructed his immortals, whom he called angels, to speak to only the most holy and pious of mankind. These men became—in time—priests of Promenthas.

  The worshipers of Promenthas brought their wants and needs to the priests, who brought them to the angels, who brought them to the archangels, who brought them to the cherubim, who brought them to the seraphim, who brought them finally—if the wants and needs were truly important—-to the attention of the God. This arrangement proved a satisfactory one, providing a well-ordered and structured society of humans who dwelt primarily in large cities on the continent of Tirish Aranth. Promenthas’s priests grew in power, religion became the center of the lives of the people, and the Promenthas himself became one of the most powerful Gods.

  Other Gods differed in their ways of utilizing the immortals, however, just as they differed in their ways of looking at Truth. Akhran—the God of Faith, Chaos, and Impatience—was also known as the Wandering God, for He could never stay in one place for any length of time but was constantly roaming the universe, seeking out new ideas, new scenes, new lands. His followers, being like their God, were nomads who roamed the desert lands of Pagrah on the continent of Sardish Jardan. Not wanting to be bothered with his faithful—who returned the favor by not wanting to be much bothered with their God—Akhran turned over almost all his power to his followers. Known as djinn, these immortals lived among men and worked with them on a day-today basis.

  Quar, God of Reality, Greed, and Law, took his time and studied the various methods of deploying immortals—from Promenthas’s hierarchy of angels to Akhran’s jumble of djinn. While Quar admired the firm grip Promenthas’s priests kept on the people with their highly structured system of rules and regulations, Quar found the bureaucratic stratification of the a
ngels cumbersome and unwieldy. Messages were often garbled in translation, it took endless amounts of time to get anything done, and—as Quar watched closely—he saw that in small matters mankind was starting to depend upon himself instead of bringing matters to the attention of Promenthas.

  Promenthas was, so Quar thought, unreasonably proud of this freedom of thought among his followers. The God of Light enjoyed the philosophical and theological discussions carried on among his people. A studious lot, the people of Tirish Aranth never tired of probing into the mysteries of life, death, and the hereafter. They relied on themselves to find gold and jewels and marry off their sons and daughters. Quar did not like to see man assuming such responsibilities; it gave him grandiose ideas.

  But neither did Quar ascribe to Akhran’s heedless casting away of all responsibility into the increasingly fat laps of the djinn, who were meddling in the mortal world with lively enthusiasm.

  Quar chose a middle ground. He established priests or Imams who ruled over the people of his realm, Tara-kan, on the continent of Sardish Jardan. The Imams were each given djinn of a lower nature who, in turn, reported to higher djinn known as ‘efreets. Quar also distributed djinn to certain people in power: Emperors, Empresses, Sultans, Sultanas, their viceroys—the Wazirs—and the generals of the armies—the Amirs. Thus the Imams did not become too powerful. . . and neither did the Emperors, the Sultans, the Wazirs, or the Amirs.

  Mankind fared well, all things considered, as each God acting through his immortals—sought to outdo the others in terms of blessings.

  Thus began the Cycle of Faith that is set forth in the Book of the Gods:

  “As a man waters a bed of flowers, so the Gods pour down streams of blessings from the heavens. The immortals catch the streams in their hands. Walking upon the world, the immortals let fall the blessings from their fingers like drops of gentle rain. Man drinks the blessing of the Gods and gives the Gods his faithful following in return. As the numbers of the faithful increase, their faith in one God becomes vast and wide as an ocean. The God drinks from the water of the ocean and in turn grows stronger and stronger. Thus is the Cycle of Faith.”