Читать книгу The Constant Tower - Carole McDonnell - Страница 12

CHAPTER 6

BROKEN PETALS

Both Psal and Ephan heard the Hinis tower arrive, but unlike Ephan, Psal did not rush out to greet his mother like a foolish child. He busied himself with soil samples, with charting towers, and with Dannal’s latest linguistics notations—a confused work of which the Chief Studier was unduly proud, but which clearly showed his enslavement to Tomah.

Outside, the marsh herons flew and young Wheel Clan boys gathered cattails and tall meadow grasses to kindle the morning fire. Peering through the keening room window past low-hanging vines and thorny brush, Psal sat surrounded by stones, leaves, shells, parchments. Ephan and the women were a long time returning. Perhaps the Peacock Clan’s fermented honey had made them merry and they had decided to bathe in the lake. But the birds in the marsh did not complain about drunken women bathers. And what of Ephan’s absence? How long did it take to pick silly flowers for one’s cold-hearted adoptive mother?

Listening was a honed skill. A good studier could hear a leaf fluttering beside its neighbor, but Psal could tell why it did so. Animal, bird, leaf song, lingering raindrop, solitary insect on a slender stalk—he could discern all. He could even tell why one grain of sand at the water’s edge echoed differently from another.

He listened to the Hinis tower song. Something was muted, as if the rhythms of many hearts had stopped. Indeed, the rocks in the forest were singing death, and the conversation of the birds was of blood. He stood, a groan escaping his lips. A strange rhythm coursed through the woodlands, alternating between coldness and heat, echoing in his spirit like a panic; he breathed deeply. He limped into the passageway and called his father, Chief Studier Dannal, and the other captains to the gathering room. Certainly, his heart must be wrong. Certainly, his senses were playing him false.

“Has Ephan returned?” he asked, when all stood before him near the hearth.

Mion, a studier born with the Wheel Clan disease, answered, “Ephan dawdles when walking alone.”

“When you were in the watchtower…did you see the women walking outside the longhouse?” Psal asked him.

“No,” Mion answered, “The doors were closed.”

“Closed?” The king’s face mirrored Psal’s fear. “The sun is almost high in the sky. Our women are not like Grassrope women, who lie about till day is half-spent.”

Soon, the Wheel Clan warriors were running through the thorny woods toward the Hinis longhouse.

Psal, too, ran, Tsbosso’s staff aiding him. The wind raced, scenting the morning breeze with blood. Yes, even the forest leaves fluttered, weighed down by blood-heavy air. In the distance, through the creeping vines: Ephan, sitting outside the Hinis tower’s main entrance, red wild flowers at his feet, yellow vines in his hand. All but Nahas stopped when they saw him, but Ephan stared into the distance—through pale blond hair, through the arriving warriors, into an unseen world far beyond. The king touched Ephan’s shoulder, time lagged. The king walked past him toward the entrance of the Hinis longhouse. Then, time, rhythm, and metre shrank.

The king placed his foot on the threshold of the longhouse door and called for Ria and Tanti. No laughter of sisters, mothers, daughters, wives. No hurried clatter of sandal, no tiny footsteps running on the wooden floor. The king moved, but some great force seemed to weight his heel; he stood near the threshold, his dagger dropped from his hand onto the longhouse floor.

For Psal too, time had returned. In an instant, he caught up to his father. He grasped Nahas’ arm. The other warriors, Lan, and Netophah pushed past them into the longhouse. The king pushed Psal away, resumed his slow steps. Psal remained outside. Pale tears on Ephan’s face and shaking hands. A sudden wail issued from inside the longhouse. Then all was still again.

Psal described the scene in his annals.

‘Oh Lowlands, lowlands, oh!

What did those warriors see?

Oh, highlands, highlands.

What can I describe to you?

Only the warriors of the Wheel Clan

Wide-eyed with horrified wonder.

Only a bright morning filled with darkness

and a longhouse turned into a tomb.’

The odor of blood met Psal at the longhouse door and like the warriors, it pushed past him, racing into the mid-morning sunlight. The light peeked in at the bloody corpse of Lan’s mother and at the foundling girl who had looked so shyly on Psal. All else lay in semi-shade, the windows still shuttered.

Blond-haired Kwin, Netophah’s closest friend, had flung open the shutters and was calling for his mother and sisters when Psal found Nahas kneeling beside Hinis’ bloodied body. Psal had often heard their acrimonious disputes; he had not thought his parents loved each other. But now his father’s sobs echoed through the longhouse, accompanied by the tramp of the warriors’ boots on the sticky floor.

Psal approached Nahas slowly, and bent over his mother. She had no face. Congealed blood blanketed his little brothers. When he had last seen them, his sisters had seemed like tiny flowers in their yellow tunics. Now they lay near his mother like broken reeds. Psal’s body trembled, and he could not stop its shaking. A hand touched his shoulder; he turned: weeping, Netophah stared past Hinis’ body to where Tanti lay.

Kneeling in his mother’s blood, Psal touched Hinis’ head. He moved his hand to her arm, half-detached from her body, and slowly intertwined his fingers with hers. In his annals he wrote:

“I thought: ‘I am alone now.

In a clan that does not accept me.’

I thought, ‘My brothers and my sisters are dead now,

and—of all here—

only they and Ephan loved me.’

I thought: ‘My Father will say to me:

Your friend has killed your mother, your sisters, and your brothers.’

I thought: ‘My friend betrayed me once when he took my woman from me,

Betrayed me twice when he killed my sisters and my brothers.

He will not live to betray me a third time.’

I thought: ‘I cannot leave the Wheel Clan.

I cannot go to my true home.

Those in my true home have betrayed me and killed my queen.’

And all at once, it struck me: ‘I have lost my mother.’”

He looked up through tear-blurred eyes and let his mother’s hand drop to the floor. He walked outside where he gently, absently, tousled Ephan’s white hair. Both sat in silence, the bright sun streaming down on them, until the warriors left the longhouse.

When the warriors returned to the Nahas longhouse, the young boys raced toward them. “Where are our mothers?” they asked. “Where are our sisters?”

No answer came from the warriors; no need. The children saw their blood-stained hands. All that day, the comfort women and Donie, the Chief Studier’s wife, wept for their lost daughters, mothers, and sisters. Donie lay in her room with her husband and her sons, Seagen and Cyrt, and lamented long into the night that her beautiful daughters and daughter-in-law were dead. From that moment, the Wheel Clan called her Rain, because she wept, saying, “My tears will fall like rain forever.”

* * * *

Throughout the day, the studiers heard tower song after tower song with the same news. In a single day, under Tsbosso’s command, the loosely-aligned Peacock Clans had massacred the women of eight hundred and seventy-one Wheel Clan longhouses. Psal did not tell the number of the murdered, but historians say some seventy-five thousand had been slaughtered—nearly all Wheel Clan woman and girl children. Another has stated that half the Wheel Clan population lay murdered at the feet of the other half.

Nahas ordered his chiefs to keen their longhouses and their dead to the Wheel Clan burial region known as the Meadows. At sunrise, longhouses filled the land. Such spontaneous cities were often formed during times of celebration and grief, this dawn brought only the mournful wail of pipes. Atop the rampart, Psal stood with his father, Ephan, and Netophah and beheld all the devastation his friend’s treachery had caused. All about them, in all directions, the bodies of dead women and children awaiting burial littered the ground.

Nahas commanded a war council. The great chiefs stood at his side upon the royal rampart. Chief Ronen, Chief Ruan, Chief Ilbis too, and the great woman warrior Hayla who had inherited her father’s chiefdom. Many more. Retribution and warfare began the next day.

Inside his chamber, Nahas called Psal, Ephan, and Netophah to him. The king spoke, choking on his sobs. “Look to your brother, Netophah,” he said. “Guide him. Because he has no heart for his people. Look to your friend, Ephan. Guide him. Your friend knows only the workings of towers, not the working of evil in evil human hearts. Both of you, keep him safe from himself or he will destroy himself and his people.”

Psal bowed to his father and hurried out.

When they were in their bedchamber, Ephan spoke, his words slurred by Rangi. “If one had told me Tsbosso would allow Samat to usurp his reason, I would not have believed him.”

The Master of the Wintersea had taught his students about both wisdom and foolishness. As far as the Firstborn was concerned, evil came from within men’s hearts, not from some invisible spiritual entity, and at another time he would have challenged Ephan’s belief in Samat. But, on that day, Ephan’s words found an echo inside Psal.

He answered, “What is ‘reason?’ It fails us always. It failed me. For had I used heart-sense instead of reasoning, I would have seen the old man’s scheming from afar. It is my own fault that all these innocents across Odunao have lost their lives. I should have heard the girl’s heart and married her, should have.…” Self-recrimination and sobbing overwhelmed his words and he lay on the floor and wept.

“Are you entirely to blame?” Ephan asked. “He sent Tzaddi to me after we returned. The very one I had longed for. In the meadow, I lay with her, amazed that one so beautiful, so regal, would lie with me. And yet, as I think back, I see clearly that the old chief was trying to seduce me as well, and was planning to betray us and to kill our mothers. So I was as foolish, as unreasonable, as you.”

Psal walked to the window where Tsbosso’s staff leaned. Geometric engravings carved on it marked events in their friendship, oaths of loyalty, and even private jokes. Before that day, Psal had imagined the Peacock Clan his haven, and Tsbosso’s longhouse his true home. But now—tears blurred that memory. He pushed the thought away and raised the staff high. He tried to break the staff—his heart also—tried to push away all hope of escaping the Wheel Clan royal longhouse. Three times he tried to break it. But the thing was made of hard wood and even harder memories; it would not break. He unsheathed his dagger and tried to hack it in two.

But Ephan took the staff from him. “Better to break the owner of this staff than the staff itself. Put aside all tears.”

PART II

THE ENCOUNTER WITH THE IDEN Peacock Clan