The Cataclysm Read online

  the planet, as Hieronymo told us, and then he leaned closer and now, he said,

  Now, I shall teach you of time

  Of the famine and plague and Pyrrhus Alecto.

  Down in the arm of Caergoth he rode:

  Pyrrhus Alecto, the knight on the night of betrayals.

  When a firebrand of burning had clouded the Straits of Hylo.

  Like oil on water, he soothed the ignited country.

  Forever and ever the villages learn his passage

  In the grain of the peasantry, life of the ragged armies.

  They carried him back to the keep of the castle

  Where Pyrrhus the Lightbringer canceled the world

  Beneath the denial of battlements,

  Where he died amid stone with his hovering armies.

  For seventeen years the country of Caergoth

  Has turned and turned in his embracing hand,

  A garden of shires and hamlets,

  And Lightbringer history hangs on the path of his name.

  X

  His duty dispatched and the old bard murdered,

  Orestes returned toward rescued Caergoth, skirting the foothills, and long were his thoughts as he passed over Southlund, the Garnet Mountains red like a memory of blood in the distance:

  There is no law,

  Orestes murmured, his hand on the harp strings,

  No rule unwritten

  That your father's slanderer

  Cannot instruct you,

  That the man you murder

  Your heart cannot honor,

  Even as your hand

  Concocts the poison.

  The landscape ahead was diminished and natural, no thing unforeseen sprang from the heavens, the waters were channeled and empty of miracles.

  So this is history,

  Orestes considered,

  So this is history

  Now I can understand

  as the road lay before him uninherited,

  heirless cut off from its making and silenced by blood.

  At the borders of Southlund the smoke was rising,

  the Arm of Caergoth harbored incessant fire:

  Orestes rode swiftly through billows of prophecy,

  the stride of his horse confirming the dead words of Arion.

  The cavalry plundering the burgeoning fields,

  leveling villages, approaching invulnerable Caergoth,

  heeded little the ride of a boy in their column cloaked in the night and in helpless mourning.

  A bard, some said, or a bard's apprentice returned to his homeland burning and desolate.

  The captain of cavalry turned to the weeping boy and addressed him as soldier as fellow and brother:

  Sooner or later, sing you this,

  Bard or bard's apprentice.

  For the voice of the harper

  The musician, the piper

  Shall no longer be heard

  In the arm of Caergoth,

  Long kept from the fire

  By the song of a poet

  Who said she was burning already:

  For a fresh fabled country

  Is the nest of invasions,

  The quarry of cavalry,

  Ripe for the sword and the fire.

  Orestes rode forth and the captain continued, turning his pale horse as a star tumbled down from the fixed dream of heaven:

  For the bard's song, they tell me,

  Is a distant belief

  In the shape of distance.

  For Caergoth was burning

  When she said in her heart,

  'I am Queen, not a widow

  And sorrow is far from me,

  Elusive as thought

  Or the changes of memory.'

  Sooner or later, sing you this.

  And he vanished in histories of rumor and smoke, and sooner or later, a bard will sing this, in beleaguered castles abandoned to night and the cough of the raven.

  Sooner or later, someone will sing of Orestes the bard, for some things the poet brings forth and fashions, and others the poet holds back: for words and the silence between them commingle, defining each other in spaces of holiness. and through them the story ascends and spirals, descends on itself and circles through time through effacing event and continuing vengeance down to the time

  I am telling and telling you this.

  MARK OF THE FLAME, MARK OF THE WORD

  Michael Williams, Teri Williams

  It began when I was fourteen, the burning, in the winter that the fires resurged on the peninsula.

  I awoke with a whirling outcry, my face awash in fire, the blankets scattering from the bed. The dogs raced from the cottage, stumbling, howling in outrage. Mother was beside me in an instant, wrapped in her own blanket, her pale hair disheveled, her eyes terror stricken.

  The burning spread down my neck and back, the pain brilliant and scoring, and I clutched at her hand, her shoulders, and shrieked again. Mother winced and fumbled silently, her thick fingers pressing hard, too hard, against my scarred lips.

  And then we were racing through the forest night.

  The freezing rain lanced like needles against the hissing scars on my neck and face. QUIET, MY DARLING, MY DOVE, LEST THEY HEAR YOU IN THE VILLAGE, her hands flashed.

  We moved over slick and glittering snow, through juniper and Aeterna, and my breath misted and crystalized on the heaped furs, and the dogs in the traces grumbled and yapped.

  Then it was light, and I lay in a dry, vaulted cavern on a hard pallet.

  Above me the druidess L'Indasha Yman rustled, draped in dried leaves and holly bobs like a pageant of late autumn. She was young for medicine, young even for divining, and I was struck by her dark eyes and auburn hair because I was fourteen years old and just becoming struck by such things.

  She gave me the Beatha to help with the pain, and it tasted of smoke and barley. The burning rushed from my scars to my throat, and then to the emptiness of my stomach.

  "They've matured, the lad's scars," she said to my mother. "Ripened." Expectantly, she turned to me, her dark eyes riveting, awaiting our questions.

  Mother's hands flickered and flashed.

  "Mother wants to know… how long…" I interpreted, my voice dry and rasping.

  "Always," said the druidess, brushing away the question. "And you?" she asked. "Trugon. What would you ask of me this time?"

  She should have known it. Several seasons ago, the scars had appeared overnight without cause, without warning. For a year they had thickened slowly, hard as the stone walls of our cottage, spreading until my entire body was covered with a network of calluses. I could no longer even tell my age. I was becoming more and more a monstrosity, and no one could say why.

  "Why. I would know why, my lady." It was always my question. I had lost hope of her answering it.

  Mother's gestures grew larger, wilder, and I would not look at her. But when L'Indasha spoke again, my heart rose and I listened fiercely.

  "It's your father's doing," the lady said, a bunch of red berries bright as blood against the corona of her hair.

  "I have heard that much," I said, wincing as Mother jostled me frantically. The pain drove into my shoulders, and still I turned my eyes from her gestures. "I want all the rest, Lady Yman. How it was his doing, and why."

  The leaves crackled as the druidess stood and drifted to the mouth of the cave. There was a bucket sitting there, no doubt to catch rainwater, for it was half filled and glazed with a thin shell of ice. With the palm of her hand, the druidess broke the ice, lifted the container, and brought it back to me, her long fingers ruddy and dripping with frigid rain. She breathed and murmured over it for a moment.

  I sat up, the heat flaring down my arms.

  "Look into the cracked mirror, Trugon," she whispered, kneeling beside me.

  I brushed Mother's desperate, restraining hand from my shoulder, and stared into the swirl of broken light.

  There was a dead man. He was small. His shadow swayed back and forth in a
room of wood and stone, dappling the floor below him with dark, then light, then dark. His fine clothing fluttered and his hood lifted slightly. I saw his face… his arms…

  "The scars. Lady, they are like mine. Who is he?"

  "Orestes," she replied, stirring the water. "Pyrrhus Orestes. Your father, hanged with a harp string."

  "And… who?" I asked, my sudden urge for vengeance stabbing as hot as the BEATHA, as the burning.

  "By his own hand, Dove," L'Indasha said. "When he thought he could neither redeem nor… continue the line."

  Redeem nor continue. It was quite confusing and I was muddled from the potion and the hour.

  L'Indasha's face reflected off the fractured ice in the bucket: it was older, wounded, a map of lost lands. "You weren't told. But Orestes got his desire and now the scars have ripened."

  Mother clutched my shoulder. The pain relented a bit.

  "Continue what? Lady, 'tis a riddle."

  A riddle the druidess answered, there in the vaulted cave, as the weather outside turned colder still and colder, on a night like those on which the fisherman claim you could walk on ice from Caergoth across the waters to Eastport.

  She told me that my father, Orestes, had ridden desperately westward as the peninsula burned at the hands of the invaders. He rode with freebooters — with Nerakans and the goblins from Throt, and they were rough customers, but he passed through Caergoth unharmed. None of them knew he was the son of Pyrrhus Alecto — "the Firebringer," as the songs called my grandfather.

  "Why did he… why didn't he…" I began to ask. I was only fourteen.

  The druidess understood and lifted her hand. "He was just one, and young. And there is a harder reason. Orestes, NOT YOUR GRANDFATHER, had brought the fires to the peninsula. You see, he murdered his master. Your grandmother had fostered his apprenticeship with Anon of Coastlund. She taught him from childhood that he must recover his father's honor at any cost. Your grandfather's honor. So he killed Arion, that he should sing no longer of your grandfather's shame."

  Mother's grip tightened on my shoulder. I shrugged her away yet again. Again the scars on my neck and face bit and nettled.

  "Go on."

  "Then the goblins came, when they heard the new song Orestes sang…"

  When Orestes saw what his words had wrought, he ran. It was at the last village seawards — Endaf, where the coast tumbles into the Cape of Caergoth — that Orestes could abide no more of the plunder and burning. Caergoth was in flames behind him, and Ebrill, where the bandits first camped, then Llun and Mercher, vanished forever in the goblin's torchlight.

  He was just one man, and he was young, but even so, surely it shamed him as much as it angered him.

  At Endaf he stopped and turned into the fray. He dismounted, broke through the goblins, and joined in a frantic attempt to rescue a woman from a burning inn. Orestes was sent to the rooftop, or he asked to go. The beams gave way with him, and the goblins watched and laughed as Orestes fell into the attic, which fell around him in turn, crashing down and up again in a rapture of fire.

  But he lived. He was fire-marked, hated of men, and they would know him by his scars henceforth. The burns had bitten deep and his face was forever changed into a stiffened mask of grief. A fugitive and a vagabond he was upon Krynn, and wherever he traveled, they turned him away. To Kaolin he went, and to Garnet, as far north as Thelgaard Keep and south to the coast of Abanasinia. In all places, his scars and his story arrived before him — the tale of a bard who, with a single verse of a song, had set his country to blaze and ruin.

  He took to bride a woman from Mercher, orphaned by the invasion and struck mute by goblin atrocity as they passed through with their flames and long knives. Orestes spirited her away to the woods of Lemish, where in seclusion they lived a dozen years in narrow hope.

  A dozen years, the druidess said, in which the child they awaited never came.

  That part I knew. Mother had told me when I was very little, the soft arc of her hand assuring me how much they had waited and planned and imagined.

  That part I knew. And Mother had shared his death with none but me. But I had never heard just how he had died.

  "In despair," the Lady Yman told me, the cavern lapsing into shadow as her brown, leafy robes blocked out the firelight, the reflection on the ice. "Despair that his country was burning still, and that no children of his would extinguish the fires. He did not know about you. Your mother had come to me, and she knew, was returning to your cottage to tell him, joyous through the wide woods.

  "She found what you've seen. Orestes could wait no longer. Your mother brought me his note to read to her: I have killed Arion, and the burning will never stop, it said. The land is cursed. I am cursed. my line is cursed. I die."

  L'Indasha reached for me as I reeled, as the room blurred through my hot tears.

  "Trugon? Trugon!"

  Redeem nor continue. I understood now, about his anger and guilt and the terrible, wicked thing he had done. The BEATHA raced through me, and the torchlight surged and quickened.

  "Why did you finally tell me?" I asked.

  "To save your life," the lady replied. She passed her hand above the broken water, and I saw a future where fires arose without cause and burned unnaturally hot, and my scars were afire, too, devouring my skin, my face, erasing all reason and memory until the pain vanished and my life as well.

  "This… this is what will be, Lady?"

  "Perhaps." She crouched beside me, her touch cool on my neck, its relief coursing into my face, my limbs. "Perhaps. But the future is changeable, as is the past."

  "The past?" The pain was gone now, gone entirely.

  "Oh, yes, the past is changeable, Trugon," L'Indasha claimed, passing from firelight to shadow, "for the past is lies, and lies can always change." She was nearing the end of the answer and the beginning of another riddle.

  "But concern yourself now with the present," she warned, and waved her hand above the troubled water.

  I saw four men wading through an ice-baffled forest, on snowshoes, their footing unsteady, armed with sword and crossbow.

  "Bandits," L'Indasha pronounced, "bound to the service of Finn of the Dark Hand"

  I shivered. The bandit king in Endaf."

  The druidess nodded. "They are looking for Pyrrhus Orestes. Remember that only your mother and you know he is dead. They seek him because of the renewed fires on the peninsula. They are bent on taking your father to the beast, for the legend now goes, and truly, I suppose, that no man can kill a bard without dire consequence, without a curse falling to him and to his children."

  She looked at me with a sad, ironic smile.

  "So the bandits are certain Orestes must die to stop the fires."

  Mother helped me to my feet.

  "I… I don't understand," I said. "It's over. He's killed himself and brought down a curse on me."

  L'Indasha waved her hand for silence. "It wasn't the killing that cursed you. It was the words — what he said before he died. Now you must go from here — anywhere, the farther, the better. But not to Finn's Ear, the bandit king's stronghold on the Caergoth shore."

  "Why should I leave?" I asked. "They are after my father, not me. I still don't understand."

  "Your scars," she replied, emphatically, impatiently. "The whole world will mistake you for your father, because of the scars."

  "I'll tell them who I really am!" I protested, but the druidess only smiled.

  "They won't believe you," she said. "They will see only what they expect. Hurry now. FIND the truth about Orestes. The finding will save your life and make the past.. unchangeable."

  I thanked her for her healing and her oracle, and she gave me one last gift — her knowledge.

  "Although now you may regret your blood," she said, "remember that you are the son of a bard. There is power in all words, and in yours especially."

  It was just more puzzlement.

  We climbed, Mother and I, into the sled, moving quickly over thick
ice on our way back to the cottage. Mother slept, and I guided the dogs and looked into the cloudless skies, where Solinari and Lunitari tilted across the heavens. Between them somewhere rode the black abscess of Nuitari, though I could not see it.