Читать книгу The Younger Gods - David Eddings - Страница 14

It was late afternoon when the hundred Trogite tubs Sorgan had borrowed from Narasan hauled into the harbor of the temple-town of Zelana’s elder sister. Sorgan, Veltan, and Padan were standing in the bow of the Ascension, the lead ship, and Sorgan was more than a little astonished by the enormity of the temple. Narasan had told him that the silly thing was about a mile square – which might be easy to say – but Sorgan realized that saying and seeing were altogether different. ‘It seems to go on forever,’ he said to Veltan in an awed sort of voice.

‘I’m sure that Aracia likes to think so,’ Veltan replied.

‘Most of it’s empty, though,’ Padan advised. ‘It’s not what I’d call jam-packed with priests and her church hangers-on. I nosed about when we first arrived last autumn, and there aren’t really that many people living there.’

‘Fat Takal Bersla was probably responsible for the overdone size of the silly thing,’ Veltan added. ‘It’s one of the many myths he’s foisted off on my big sister. He claims that there are thousands and thousands of priests living in that absurdity. Aracia’s absolutely certain that she has worshipers beyond counting living here, but she never bothers to look. There might be thousands and thousands of creatures living here, but most of them are probably mice.’

‘Or spiders,’ Padan added. ‘I roamed around in that foolishness last fall, and most of the corridors in “Holy Temple” are jammed to the ceiling with cobwebs.’

‘It’s nothing but a hoax, then?’ Sorgan asked.

‘A “holy hoax,” Captain Hook-Beak,’ Veltan corrected. ‘Aracia devoutly believes that the absurdity her priests have foisted off on her is a sign of her overwhelming importance.’

‘That’s pathetic,’ Sorgan declared.

‘That’s a fair description of my sister, yes,’ Veltan agreed.

‘We’ve got company coming,’ Padan said, pointing across the bay. ‘I’d say that it’s most probably fat old Bersla coming out here to find out what we want.’

‘That thing doesn’t look at all like Longbow’s canoe,’ Sorgan observed.

‘It’s not really the same thing, Sorgan,’ Veltan agreed. ‘Longbow’s canoe is designed to carry one man. The ugly thing coming out here to meet us is designed for show. Bersla yearns to be important, and he thinks that having hundreds of men paddling him out here makes him look important.’

Sorgan squinted at the approaching boat. ‘It looks to me like it was made out of a single tree-trunk.’

‘That’s fairly common here in the Land of Dhrall,’ Veltan said. ‘They’re called “dugouts,” probably because making them involves scraping out most of the log with sharp stones. I’ve never actually seen one built before, but I’m told that most of them are partially hollowed out with fire – very well-controlled fire, of course. There are certain advantages, though. A boat made from a single log wouldn’t leak, would it?’

‘Maybe not,’ Sorgan said, ‘but if it doesn’t have a keel, it’ll probably roll over any time one of the paddlers sneezes or hiccups.’

‘That has happened here fairly often, Captain Hook-Beak,’ Veltan said, grinning broadly. ‘Stately – but not very bright – Bersla doesn’t understand why just yet but it might come to him – eventually.’

‘That’s pure stupidity!’ Sorgan declared.

‘I’d say that’s a fair description of Bersla, yes. You’ve already met Aracia herself back in my Domain, so you don’t really need Bersla to introduce you to her. He’s terribly impressed with himself. He’ll demand to know why you’re here, but I’d suggest that you tell him that you’re here to see Aracia herself, not some servant.’

‘Won’t that offend him?’

‘Probably, yes. I’d say that you should tell him that you’re too important to talk to servants. When we reach the temple, I’ll introduce you to my sister and tell her that you’ll defend her temple if she’ll pay you enough.’

‘That sounds good to me,’ Sorgan replied. ‘How should I behave? Am I supposed to bow to her or any of that other nonsense?’

‘A certain amount of arrogance wouldn’t hurt. Tell her that you’re the mightiest warrior in the world, so you’re worth your weight in gold – that sort of thing. One thing you should always remember. Don’t let her give you orders. Tell her that you’ll do what’s necessary to defend her, and you don’t want any interference from her or her priesthood. Get that established right away. You’re going to be tearing down a large part of her temple, so there’ll be a lot of screaming from the priests. Tell them that you have her permission, and that they should mind their own business. Pull out your sword, if you have to.’

‘Or maybe even if I don’t, right?’

‘Now you’re getting the idea. I think you’ll do just fine, but you’ll have to push my sister back into a corner as well, and that might take a few days.’

‘It’d better not, Veltan,’ Padan said. ‘Captain Hook-Beak has to persuade your sister to let him do things his way, but he can’t drag it out for too long. They’ll have to reach an agreement before he unloads his men and frees up all the ships here in the harbor. Those ships are vital to Narasan, because half of his army is still sitting on that beach up in Lord Dahlaine’s territory.’

‘He does have a point there, Veltan,’ Sorgan said. ‘I promised Narasan that I’d release his ships as soon as possible, and I don’t lie to my friends.’

‘I can manipulate a few things,’ Veltan said, frowning slightly. ‘A good following wind would recover a day or two. We can give you that much time to manipulate my sister if you need to. After that, you might have to be sort of arbitrary in your dealings with Aracia.’

‘I don’t see much of a problem there, Veltan,’ Sorgan declared. ‘I am a Maag, after all, and we invented arbitrary.’

The obviously unstable log-boat pulled alongside the Ascension, and the grossly fat priest rose to his feet to stand in the bow – which struck Sorgan as an act of sheer stupidity. ‘We have beheld your approach to the temple of Holy Aracia,’ he declared in a rolling sort of voice, ‘and we must know of your purpose here.’

Veltan stepped forward. ‘I am Veltan,’ he said, ‘the younger brother of she who guides you.’

‘I have not heard of you,’ Bersla declared in a haughty tone of voice. ‘Surely Holy Aracia would have advised me that she has a brother beside Mighty Dahlaine.’

‘I wouldn’t depend on Aracia very much if I were you, fat man. Her mind isn’t all that stable anymore.’

‘Blasphemy!’ Bersla exclaimed in a shocked tone.

‘Not if it’s true, it isn’t,’ Veltan disagreed. ‘I see that you’re going to need some convincing. Watch closely, fat man, and pay close attention. This is your only chance to avoid my resentment.’ Then Veltan slowly rose up into the empty air above the Ascension to stand on nothing but air.

Fat Bersla went pale, and his eyes bulged almost out of their sockets.

‘I can go higher, if you’d like,’ Veltan said. ‘I could even take you up into the air with me, if that would convince you. I am unlimited, Takal Bersla. If need be, I can carry you all the way up to the moon – but I don’t think you’d like that very much. There’s nothing to eat on the moon, and no air to breathe, so you’d probably die almost immediately.’

‘I believe you!’ Bersla declared in a shrill voice. ‘I believe you!’

‘Isn’t he just the nicest fellow?’ Veltan mildly asked the others.

It took the trembling Bersla a while to recover. ‘I pray you, Lord Veltan,’ he said, ‘why have you come here?’

‘It should be obvious, priest of my sister,’ Veltan replied. ‘The Creatures of the Wasteland will soon invade my dear sister’s Domain, and I have brought fearless warriors to drive them away.’

‘Eternally grateful shall we be if you succeed, Lord Veltan.’

‘Were you planning to live eternally, High Priest Bersla?’ Veltan asked with feigned astonishment.

‘Ah – we will pass this on to generations as yet unborn, timeless Veltan,’ Bersla amended. ‘May I speak now with the chieftain of these mighty warriors who have come from afar to defend our Holy Aracia?’

‘I don’t waste my time speaking with servants,’ Sorgan declared as roughly as he could. ‘Let’s go talk with your sister, Veltan.’

‘That cannot be!’ Bersla protested. ‘Holy Aracia’s time is all filled for this day. As you may know, however, I speak for Divine Aracia when it seems necessary.’

‘Not to me, you don’t,’ Sorgan declared. ‘I only talk with those who have gold.’

Sorgan and Veltan conferred briefly, and then a sailor with nothing else to do untied a rope that held a well-built skiff in place, and then he lowered it over the side.

‘That is not permitted!’ Bersla declared. ‘No alien ships or boats may go ashore in Holy Aracia’s Domain.’

‘You don’t think for one minute that I’m going to ride to the beach in that unstable canoe of yours, do you?’

‘It is perfectly sound,’ Bersla declared.

‘Of course it is, Sorgan replied sarcastically. ‘At least it might be as long as you leave it on the beach. It’s when you push it out into the bay that it tends to roll over without much warning. How many times has that happened so far this month?’

Bersla began to splutter a denial, but there was a muscular oarsman sitting just behind the fat priest, and he held one hand up with the fingers stretched wide and two fingers of his other hand clearly visible. Then he winked at Sorgan.

‘Let me guess,’ Sorgan said to Bersla then. ‘I’ve got a strong hunch that your tree-stump tub has rolled out from under you seven times already this month.’

Bersla’s eyes went wide. ‘How did you – ?’ Then he broke off.

‘Instinct, fat man,’ Sorgan replied. ‘I’ve spent most of my life at sea, so I know a lot about things that happen out on the water.

Logs always roll over in the water when you don’t want them to, and seven’s a lucky – or unlucky – number, be it logs or dice.’ He made a slight gesture to the muscular oarsman, and the fellow nodded. ‘Let’s go hit the beach, Veltan,’ Sorgan said then. ‘I want to meet your sister, and then I’ll look around. If I’m going to defend her territory, there are a lot of things I’ll need to know.’

‘How in the world did you know that Bersla’s log-canoe had rolled over seven times already this month?’ Veltan asked as Sorgan rowed the skiff toward the beach.

‘You weren’t watching very closely if you missed it,’ Sorgan replied with a broad grin. ‘When I asked the fat priest how many times his log-boat had rolled over, one of the oarsmen held up seven fingers.’

‘Why would he do that?’

‘I haven’t got any idea. I’m going to talk with him later and find out, though. It’s entirely possible that he might turn out to be very useful later on.’

‘Does he know that you want to talk with him?’

‘Of course he does. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Veltan, but you don’t pay very close attention to what’s going on around you. That oarsman gave me a wink when he held up his fingers, and I pointed at my mouth after I threw “seven” into the fat priest’s face. Pointing your finger at your mouth can mean two things – “let’s eat” or “let’s talk.” Everybody knows that.’

‘It does make sense, I suppose.’

‘Are we going to have any trouble getting in to see your sister?’

‘Probably not,’ Veltan replied. ‘Aracia knows who I am, after all, and as soon as she sees me, she’ll know that I’ve got some information for her. I’ll introduce you to her, and then we can get down to business.’

It had seemed to Sorgan when he’d been on board the Trogite ship out in the bay that there’d been a kind of coherence about Aracia’s temple, but as the skiff came closer to shore he began to see some glaring inconsistencies. ‘I don’t want to sound critical or anything, Veltan,’ he said, ‘but there’s a sort of slapdash quality about your big sister’s palace. Didn’t the people who were building it ever get together and establish some rules? In some places, the stones are very smooth, but in others they’re rough and lumpy.’

‘There do seem to be quite a few inconsistencies,’ Veltan agreed. ‘I’d say that the assorted work crews didn’t have anything to do with each other. Some of them appear to have spent a great deal of time polishing the stones, while others concentrated on piling up more rocks.’

‘Something on the order of “prettier” or “bigger”, you mean?’

‘That probably comes very close, Sorgan. I don’t imagine that Aracia really cared much one way or the other. As long as her temple kept growing, she was probably quite happy.’

‘She’s not really very bright, is she?’

‘I wouldn’t go quite that far. Aracia has different needs than the rest of us do. She desperately needs adoration, and her priests spend all of their time adoring her. I’m fairly sure that they didn’t spend much of that vital time telling the work crews who were building the temple how to proceed, and that’s what probably led to these inconsistencies.’

‘It’s possible, I guess.’ Sorgan turned and looked a bit more closely at the beach. ‘No piers,’ he grumbled.

‘Building piers would take the work crews away from expanding big sister’s temple,’ Veltan explained.

‘We’ll have to climb all over her right away,’ Sorgan said.

‘I didn’t quite follow that.’

‘We’ll need piers when we unload the people from about a hundred Trogite tubs, Veltan,’ Sorgan declared. ‘They won’t be willing to swim in the dead of winter, you know.’

‘Good point there,’ Veltan said. ‘I think I’ll have to cheat,’ he added glumly.

‘Cheat?’

‘I’ll make the piers myself. I know what they look like, and I’ll be able to set them up much faster than the temple work crews possibly could. Then, too, if I do it, we won’t have to listen to all the sniveling and complaining we’d get if we pulled the crews away from their “Holy” task of expanding my sister’s temple until it’s fifty or a hundred miles square.’

‘Which probably won’t take them much more than a few hundred years,’ Sorgan added.

They pulled the skiff up onto the beach and then walked directly up to Aracia’s temple.

When they reached the entrance, however, Sorgan’s heart almost stopped beating. ‘Is that door made out of what I think it is?’ he gasped.

‘Oh, yes,’ Veltan replied. ‘There might be a bit of bracing here and there, but most of it is gold.’

‘There must be a ton of it!’ Sorgan exclaimed.

‘More than that, I’d say,’ Veltan replied. ‘Gold is very heavy, and that’s quite a large door.’

‘Are you saying that your sister just leaves it right out in the open like that?’

‘It’s fairly safe, Sorgan. I doubt if a hundred men – or even two hundred – would be able to pick it up and carry it. Let’s go on inside and have our little chat with my sister, shall we?’

‘Who are you, and why have you profaned the temple of Holy Aracia with your presence?’ an officious-sounding young lady demanded as Veltan and Sorgan entered the corridor beyond the golden door.

‘My name is Veltan,’ Sorgan’s friend replied. ‘You may have heard of me – assuming that my sister remembers the rest of her family. You can go tell her that I’m here – or step aside and I’ll go tell her myself.’

‘You would not dare. I am Alcevan, the priestess of Holy Aracia, and I speak for her in all matters.’

‘Aracia has women priests now?’ Veltan said, sounding more than a little startled. ‘Does Bersla know about this?’

The young lady sneered. ‘Fat Bersla only knows what Holy

Aracia and I want him to know. He might think that he’s the most important person in Aracia’s Domain, but that’s no longer true. I am the one who speaks for Holy Aracia now, for I am her High Priestess and always will be.’

‘That’s very nice, I suppose,’ Sorgan told her, ‘but you’re going to be a doormat if you don’t get out of the way.’ He put his hand on his sword-hilt in a threatening gesture.

Her eyes went very wide, and she turned and fled.

‘Now that’s something I wouldn’t have expected,’ Veltan said. ‘It seems that things are getting more and more complicated here in Aracia’s Domain.’

‘The little lady could have been just making this up,’ Sorgan said.

‘It’s possible, maybe,’ Veltan replied. ‘I think we’d better keep our eyes open, though. If the young woman was telling us the truth, Aracia’s playing a different game now.’ He squinted slightly. ‘I think maybe you should hold onto this attitude you just threw into Alcevan’s face. Be sort of rough and abrupt. Let’s keep Aracia off balance if we possibly can.’

Sorgan was somewhat startled by the sheer size of the room at the end of the corridor. At the very center, of course, was a massive marble pedestal topped by a golden throne and backed with dark red drapes. Zelana’s sister was sitting on the throne, and the little lady Alcevan was kneeling before her and babbling.

Veltan went directly to the pedestal. ‘I wouldn’t pay too much attention to anything the young lady’s telling you, dear sister,’ he said. ‘We had a slight misunderstanding out in the corridor. I wasn’t aware of the fact that you were now accepting women as members of your priesthood.’

Aracia straightened, glaring at her younger brother. ‘Who is this pagan, Veltan?’ she demanded. ‘And why have you profaned my holy temple with his presence?’

‘You know who I am, sister of Zelana,’ Sorgan declared. ‘We met in Veltan’s Domain last summer. He brought me here to defend you and your people when the bug-things invade, but since you and your stupid priests don’t appreciate that, I’ll just go back out to the harbor and sail away. From what I’ve seen so far here in the Land of Dhrall, I’d imagine that the Vlagh will have you for breakfast some day very soon.’ And then he stormed out of the room, winking at Veltan as he went by.

‘Maybe just a trifle extreme there, Sorgan,’ Veltan’s voice came softly out of nowhere.

‘I think maybe I got carried away just a bit,’ Sorgan admitted. ‘Your sister and that uppity lady-priest of hers irritated me more than a little.’

Veltan’s laugh came out of nowhere. ‘On second thought, Sorgan, don’t change a thing. I’m quite sure that my sister will come around fairly soon. Go on back out to your ship and wait. I’m almost certain that she’ll send someone out to talk with you before long.’

‘I hope you’re right, Veltan,’ Sorgan replied. ‘I didn’t leave myself very much room to wiggle out of this.’