Ted Dekker - Mortal

“We will honor his death forever,” he said.

Roland turned toward the smoking pyres. “We will honor his death by living forever.”

This new preoccupation seemed seared into Roland. Just as he had fused his people with their identity as Nomads, he would now draw them into his new mission: to live as a superior race that answered to no one but their prince.

How was that so different from the mission of the Dark Bloods?

“What will you do?”

“I will take my people north. We will regroup and grow stronger. When the day comes, we will do what is necessary.”

“What day?”

“The day we overcome all oppression and rule.”

Rule how? Rom wanted to ask. But instead, he only nodded.

The prince dipped his head and walked away.

FOR TWO DAYS, the Seyala Valley lay under the gloom of shattered hope and mangled dreams. Under Rom’s orders the ruin’s stone courtyard had been washed clean of blood and the inner sanctum left vacant. Some of the yurts had been erected, but many slept in temporary shelters made of canvas flaps. Night fires burned, but the songs and dancing that had once filled the valley were not to be seen or heard except on the north end, where some of the Nomads raged about their exploits in war and spoke of coming days of glory.

Triphon’s dead body served as a constant and macabre reminder of defeat. Rom resisted questions as to the sanity of leaving a dead body exposed and defied mounting pressure to give Triphon a proper burial. Instead, he agreed to move the post with Triphon’s body to the side of the ruins where it was not so flagrantly visible.

The greater question confronting them all was far more urgent: what about those who still lived?

There was no Mortal Sovereign to take the seat of power. No new kingdom to waken the world to life. No miraculous and fanatical boy to inspire hope. No promise of life beyond that which already ran, rampant but aimless, in their own veins.

Only a broken valley with ruins bathed in the memory of blood.

Nothing made sense.

The council had met twice in an attempt to find consensus, but no clear path could be agreed upon. Rom and the Keepers were too distraught with the inequity of Jonathan’s death to even consider direction, let alone the future. How could the one who’d promised them a new kingdom have removed that possibility by offering up his own life? In his slaughter of the Dark Bloods, he’d displayed more skill and strength than any Mortal might have expected of him. Why, then, had he bared his chest and given up the sword to Saric? Why?

The sky might have cleared, but the valley was shrouded in the thick fog of confusion and grief.

Even Roland, so steadfast in his resolve to see their new race of Nomads rise in power, offered few particulars as to how they should proceed.

North, yes. With full life, yes. But what of the expectation for freedom and autonomy embraced by his people during Jonathan’s life? What now?

Jordin was rarely seen in the valley, preferring instead the company of Jonathan’s grave. Rom had gone to the plateau on the eve of the second night to meditate and found her curled up next to the freshly disturbed earth, asleep. He’d sat down and watched the steady rise and fall of her breathing, trying for the hundredth time to make sense of the questions that flooded his mind.

He had never known Jonathan to speak untruth or to mislead. Then what had he meant in saying on the day of his death that he was bringing a new realm of Sovereignty? And how could he, when his blood had lost its potency?

Was it possible Jonathan had simply succumbed to the pressure of expectation that he would deliver them all? To the years of being bled, viewed less and less as a boy and more as a vessel of power?

Was it their own fault that they had pushed a fragile boy to grow into a leader that he had not owned the strength to become?

What could it mean to follow him as he’d urged in his last days? How did one follow the dead?

What of the storm and earthquake? Some called it the Maker’s Hand. Others said it was nothing more than a terrible storm.

For that matter, did the Maker even exist? Some said no-how could He, given all that had happened? What had happened in Jonathan’s blood was a matter of genetics, of science, and not mystery. Two days earlier, Rom would have derided them as blind and ungrateful, but how could he today? Why would a Maker allow the one source of true life to die?

Everything he’d believed had been thrown into doubt.

And Feyn… what of her? What had they agreed to at their summit? Why had she fled after delivering him to Saric, never once looking back?

As for Saric… His slaying of Jonathan was clearly a victory, but what of his apparent breakdown before Jonathan? And where had he gone?

The questions refused to abate as he returned to camp, leaving Jordin to her exhausted sleep as day turned to night, and night to day.

The evening before, Roland announced that he and twenty Immortals were journeying north the next day. They would find a new valley in which to rebuild. There was no longer a reason to remain close to the city. He had no more clear direction than that, only that it was time for his people to embrace their new life and to consider the centuries before them.

It would mean a split between those Keepers and Nomads who wished to remain close to Byzantium with Rom and those forsaking any further notion of bringing life to the world’s capital city.

That night, sleep came hard, and then only in confused snatches. Rom tossed, writhing with the same questions, reliving again and again every encounter with Jonathan the last days of his life until his dreams became a jumbled collage.

“Jonathan?” he whispered once, into the darkness. Feeling foolish, he closed his eyes. Finally, he slept.

Rom.

A whisper from the ether of sleep.

Rom.

I know the way.

But there was no way. He’d known it once with the surety of his every conviction, and it had failed him.

Rom.

Something nudged him.

No, not something, but someone.

“Rom. Rom!”

His eyes snapped wide and he stared up into a face in the darkness. Round eyes peered at him from a smudged, tearstained face. Her hair was a knotted mess.

Rom sat up. “Jordin?”

She stood with her arms limp at her side, looking half crazed.

So it was catching.

“Jordin. What is it?”

Had Saric returned? Feyn? Was Roland leaving under cover of the night?

“I know what he meant,” she whispered. “I know what we need to do.”

“What who meant, Jordin?”

“Jonathan told us to follow him. He told me. He made me promise. I know what he meant.”

The poor girl was breaking, undone by grief and her refusal to eat.

He sighed and ran his fingers through his tangled hair. “Please, Jordin… You have to get some rest.”

“I know how to follow him,” she said.

“He’s dead, Jordin! You have to accept that.”

She merely stared at him.

He sighed, closed his eyes and opened them again, willing himself to patience.

“All right. Tell me,” he said. “Tell me how to follow a dead man.”

“We have to take his blood.”

He returned her stare, not sure whether to be horrified or laugh at her.

“We already have his blood.”

“We have his old blood.”

“We have the blood he gave us when he was alive!”

“It’s in his blood.”

She said it all as if were obvious, so simple.

“Jordin. He’s in the earth. His blood is that of a corpse-literally.”

“It’s in the blood. There are three vessels of blood in his grave.”