Читать книгу The Emperor of the Ancient Word and Other Fantastic Stories - Darrell Schweitzer - Страница 7

THE HERO SPOKE

We regret our lies most of all.

—The Book of Mirrors

So he spoke, opening up the hoard of his words. They flowed forth, like spilled gold.

“Lies,” he said, “all lies.”

He was a young man, I could tell, under the grime and the scars. When he took off his helmet and placed it in his lap, I saw a smooth face, barely able to sustain a beard.

Weeping, he denied everything.

“None of it is true,” he said. “I am not the one you think I am. I didn’t do the things I myself have claimed to have done. This helmet is not mine. It belongs to another, who will surely come to claim it and his vengeance.”

The helmet was of tarnished bronze, with a T-shaped split for the eyes and nose, a huge black, horsehair crest on top. Indeed, the helmet of a champion. It gleamed dully in the firelight.

We two sat in the dark, beneath the brilliant stars, at a crossroads.

“Tell the story then, as a story, as a lie.”

He wept, and spoke:

“It’s not true,” he said, “that I journeyed in the company of a genuine hero, whose name is immortal, though I am unworthy to repeat it. Call him my Master, then.”

“Hypothetically,” I said, “part of the lie.”

“Yes.”

“We sat around a campfire, much like this one. Imagine that much. In the dark and cold. The great man hunched by the fire, while I tended to what needed to be tended to. And his words, like thunder in my mind. Of course you will sing my praises, boy, he said. He spoke without any boastfulness, merely stating a fact as obvious as the weather. Of course I would sing his praises, though he shouldn’t have called me a boy. Anyone who has spent five summers fighting alongside one such as he has the right to be called a man, but heroes have no time for such details. It is the way of things.

“So we paused to rest beneath the strange, faint stars—not the stars of Earth at all, but those stars which rise out of the mist as you descend the final slope toward the river, on the border of the Land of the Dead. Wizards have names for those stars. I do not.

“We had come through the country of the centaurs. We had battled dragons, men, and winged demons. We had cut down countless foes, trampling thousands into the mud and dust. Now, here, on the last night, beneath those stars, high up the bank above the Dark River, he seemed to recede into his helmet and his armor, to become all the less a man, more a purely heroic force, the crest of his helmet giving him the appearance of a fierce and predatory bird, an avenger of the gods. It was the supreme honor of my life to be with him that night, as he recounted the story thus far, numbering our deeds that they might be more easily remembered.

“I was to be the first to remember them, the first to put them into the form of telling, into words which would be improved upon by others. Let me begin the process that would continue on even as I myself would be forgotten, like a vast river flowing from an unknown source.

“We sharpened our weapons, and then we slept. Before I faded away completely I tried to compose a few heroic lines, but the music did not come to me. Never mind. I, like my Master, was beyond all such things now. Let others, who did not witness, refine the telling.

“After a time, we awoke, in the dark, for the sun did not rise here. Beneath those scant stars, we made our way down the bank.

“I heard water flowing gently nearby. The River. Our goal. Did I truly hear it, or dream it? Were we transported in our dreams at the very end, or did we rise up and walk the final distance?

“There, at the very lip of the waters, we slew our horses, in final sacrifice, as was required of us, and we poured out the blood on the barren earth, and we saw, clearly before us, as if a curtain had parted, the great River of the Dead and the Land of the Dead beyond it. We walked along that penultimate shore, pouring out libations of blood from our cupped hands, and it seemed that the spirits rose up around us like cold mist, whispering in our ears, pleas, curses, sometimes just names.

“We accosted the Ferryman, where his boat was tied up at a little dock. We held out our hands and let him lick the blood off them like a dog. This was sufficient payment for our passage, though I could tell from his hungry eyes, from the way his shrunken face swayed lustfully, that he greatly desired the living blood within our veins.

“But he would not have that. My Master drew his sword and as if to whack the vile creature’s head clean off. He pointed to the boat and to the further shore, and the Ferryman laughed, like the wind wheezing through rattling bones.

“So we set forth, until the nearer shore was lost behind us in darkness and the hills on the far side loomed huge and black, blotting out even those few stars of the Deathlands. No one spoke. The Ferryman strained at his oar.

“I heard the angry voice of a rival I had once slain in a duel, buzzing in my ear like an insect, then fading away to a remembrance, then gone.

“On the further shore, as we disembarked, the Ferryman groveled before us, both pleading and demanding at the same time, as we had known he would. At a signal from my Master, I drew my sword and he his, and we struck off the Ferryman’s head and broke his bones, and ground him into the dust of the Deathlands, lest he raise the alarm at our coming.

“Then we pressed on, against the black wind, against the impenetrable night which would have devoured us. We leaned into our shields, while the Deathlands, alarm or no, threw up against us every terror, every danger and pain and dread we had ever known. All our slain foes fought us once again, and yet my great and perfect Master did not waver, and when once I stumbled, he bore me up.

“I worshipped him then. He, truly, more than any other, deserved to be celebrated in epic and song, my own humble efforts at first, then those of the great bards to come after.

“Yet I cannot speak his name.”

* * * * * * *

The teller stopped telling the tale, holding his tear-streaked face in his hands, perhaps to add verisimilitude to an otherwise unconvincing pack of lies, for heroes do not weep, but liars often do.

Idly, I picked up his helmet out of his lap to examine it. I even made to try it on.

But he screamed, and snatched it back, leaping to his feet and drawing his battered sword. I myself did not rise. I saw only madness in his eyes, gleaming there in the firelight. I think he would have cut my head off in another second, but I bade, him, in a soothing voice, to sit down again and continue telling lies, and I promised not to believe a word of it.

* * * * * * *

“It’s all a muddle,” he said. “It makes no sense. How then was I ever supposed to tell the story, and why did my Master command me to rehearse the tale of our deeds? Why did I struggle toward the composition of heroic lines, if I was never supposed to return from the mission, if he intended to betray me? Heroes do not commit treachery. It is impossible. I can’t go on—”

“I believe you can,” I said, “though I believe nothing else.”

* * * * * * *

“This, then, is untrue:

“We came at last to that great palace of bone, which rises like a mountain into the black sky, where dwells the King of Death with all his secret treasures. We stood before the massive gates whereon are carven a record of all the sins and folly of mankind. The lights in the windows far above us glowed a pale green, like baleful eyes, when we pounded on that gate with the pommels of our swords.

“All, thus far, according to plan.

“But the gate would not open, and I stood there, looking at my Master, and he at me, and I thought, for the very first time, that my Master was at a loss as to what to do, that he had no further stratagem.

“He put his hand gently on my shoulder, and rehearsed again, in synoptic form yet more eloquently than I ever could—words made golden by the mere fact that he, the inestimable Hero, was speaking thus—the tale our deeds, praising as he did my own role in the consummation of things, the unravellings of Fate or the doom of the gods or whatever one should call it.

“‘That is for a poet to decide,’ he said.

“‘Shall not I, then?’

“He shook his head sadly. ‘I’m afraid not.’

“He explained to me, solemnly, but with deliberation, that it was, alas, the inherent nature of our mission that only one of us was to return from it, either the Hero was to accomplish the thing or the Companion who would witness it, but not both, because someone’s blood, living blood, must be shed before these gates if ever they were to open, so that someone might storm the very citadel of King Death and learn his secrets, to demand an explanation and remedy for the world’s pain, for the benefit of mankind.

“‘It’s very important,’ he said.

“‘What about the song of your praise, which I am supposed to compose?’ I asked.

“‘Merely a ruse,’ he said, ‘to get you to come along. I’ll try to remember some of it. I regret this. It is truly regrettable.’

* * * * * * *

“I can’t—!” The teller broke off his narration once again. He wept like a child who has been beaten, just then, though he had the form of a man, and, wearing his crested helmet now, had assumed the aspect of an avenger of the gods.

“Say on—”

“In the lie of the man who was lying, the liar told untruths, that my Master might resort to such tactics. Since he could not, he could not be my Master, therefore this is not the tale of him, and I, who went into the Land of the Dead at his side, cannot be telling it. There can only be silence now.”

“How did it all turn out?”

“I don’t know.”

“Make something up.”

* * * * * * *

“Truly regrettable, I agreed, and I wept for my Master as I drew my sword stealthily in the dark and ran him through, slipping the sword up past his groin, under his breastplate. With a hard, upward jerk I gutted him like a fish.

“He looked down at me in amazement, and sputtered something, but only blood and foam poured out of his mouth and out of the immense wound beneath his breastplate.

“His blood splashed upon the ground before the Bone Gates. I touched the carvings and smeared blood on them, and the carven figures wriggled beneath my hands like a netful of fish, reconfiguring themselves to record even this latest folly of mankind.

“Yet it wasn’t a folly.

“I tell you I slew him because I loved him, because only by this means could he die with his soul entirely pure, the tale his deeds untainted by treachery.

“And the gates of the Palace of the King of Death swung wide, and it was I who stormed in, leaning into my shield against the black wind, against all the terrors the place might hold.

“It was I who burst into the inner hall, to confront the Dark Lord on his dark throne, only to discover that throne empty.

“Nothing there. Only dust and the echoes of my footsteps, as I climbed the steps before the great seat and took into my hands the very bronze, plumed helmet into which my Master’s face had vanished entirely when I left his corpse crumpled by the gate.

“Yet. There. The helmet, in my hand.

“It was the final step that completes a dance. I sat upon the throne. I put the bronze helmet on my own head. I receded into it, so that whoever I had been faded away.

“Before my eyes, the walls of the bone palace thinned into mist, and I saw the stars beyond, and beyond the stars the wild, mad faces of the gods of war and of pain and of nightmares rising out of the universal darkness like an inevitable tide.

“And I gained the secret my Master and I had come for. It was mine now, for I was the Hero. I had stolen his name. I felt the terror and despair of all those he had slain in the course of his wars, for how can there be a Hero without violence, and what is the Hero but Death, an ender of lives?

“This palace was my own.”

* * * * * * *

“Or it would be, if you were telling the truth,” I said. “Of course you are not.”

Weeping still, he rose, helmet upon his head and covered his face, sword in hand. I could not see his eyes.

“The Hero must rise up and go into the world of living men, and there commit deeds of unspeakable atrocity so that men will admire him; and this must continue until he can recruit some companion, who would love him so much, so desire that the tale of his deeds remain pure, that the Hero might gain release.”

He raised his sword. I thought he was going to kill me.

I said, “It might work that way...in the story. Which isn’t true. Which is over.”

“For the Hero, perhaps. But no one loves a liar. No one will ever give him release.”

He vanished into the night then, and I almost thought I had dreamed the entire episode, but for the war and plague, fire and death that followed in his wake like a tide over the subsequent weeks and months and years, for which such a farrago of lies can hardly be sufficient explanation.

That morning, I took up my own sword and put on my own helmet and set out after him.