Michael Williams - Galen Beknighted

To this day, I have sworn off baked goods. They smack too much of catastrophe.

There we sat until it was over. There was a final rumble somewhere off to the north of us, then an incredible stillness, out of which arose an even more incredible birdsong, as a nearby nightingale, duped by the smoke and the dust in the air, warbled in the ruins.

For a while, Brithelm wept for them all-for the Que-Tana who had not escaped, and even for Firebrand. It is safe to say that none of the rest of us could weep for the Namer, and yet each of us stood quietly a moment as the air and the landscape settled.

And I realized that, despite my great misgivings, there was something of history in this.

As the voices choired and swelled in the ancient Que-Tana Song of Firebrand, the one man worthy of the name lifted the Namer's crown. Maimed by fire, and an unlikely hero because of his maiming, he had nonetheless led a people into the light.

Unlike the pretender to his name and his crown, this new Firebrand would treat his calling and the stones with reverence and care. Quietly he placed the crown upon his own head. Now he sang the names of the heroes, and the Plainsmen chanted back a refrain as a thousand voices joined in committing those names to memory.

Going home was a long road, as it always is.

There's some philosophy in that, but lengthening the miles for my little company was the simple fact that our horses were gone. We couldn't have brought them with us underground, where the narrow passages and delicate footing would have jammed them in the rocks, no doubt, or brought a thousand equine pounds down upon one of us.

Still, you couldn't help but regret their absence when the prospect of walking doubled the length of your journey-a journey that had to be long, it turned out, to contain all that I learned.

The dust that the quake had raised did not settle until evening came, until all of us had reached an even thicker cluster of trees at the base of the foothills, spread over a cluster of towering rocks.

From the top of the largest rock, through the parted branches when the moon and the stars emerged, you could see down and east into the foothills and the plains of Solamnia beyond. When the lights winked on in the westmost villages of my adopted country, I was watching with my brother Brithelm, the two of us wrapped in a blanket against weather and wind and night.

"I suppose that one of us will have to tell Father," I observed after a silence. "I mean, about Alfric."

My brother nodded, his eyes still fixed on the country below him. His red hand slipped from under the blanket, its index finger glowing, as he traced aimless designs on the surface of the rock.

"1 just imagine him down there among the rocks," I continued. "Him and Marigold, of course. Beginning some ghostly dance in eternity."

"That's almost poetic, Galen," Brithelm said with a sad smile, "until you remember what kind of dancers they were while alive and breathing."

"It's as though everything came together in misfortune down there, Brithelm," I said and paused.

"Brithelm, I have a confession."

My brother looked at me solemnly.

"I saw Weasel back in those caverns. Not me, but the one I was years ago when all this adventuring began. And I came to the conclusion that I'm not all that different from what I was then about… about this whole knighthood business. I've been lying, Brithelm. Lying to almost everyone about my courage and my principles and the Measure and the Oath, until now and again I almost believe my own stories.

"It's frightening. I've been thinking it's like one of Gileandos's proverbs coming alive, where 'the liar gets trapped in his own stitchery' or some such self-righteous nonsense. Somehow it got us free, though. Got us all out of Firebrand's clutches and here, back on the road to Castle di Caela and home."

Brithelm nodded. "And why are you telling me this?" he asked.

"Oh… I'm not sure. Perhaps I've decided never to lie again."

"I do not think you have decided that," Brithelm replied.

Then solemnly he looked back out over Solamnia.

"I am afraid I have a confession, too," he whispered. "You know when I dawdled the time with Firebrand asking him all those questions about tenebrals? You heard the story from the Que-Tana."

"I remember, Brother. What did you learn about tenebrals?"

"Nothing," Brithelm replied. "Can't say as I care, either. Filthy little animals, tenebrals are. Never liked them to begin with."

I stifled a laugh. "Don't tell me you were lying, too?"

"Not lying as much as… being a good guest, Galen," Brithelm replied soberly, his finger still tracing luminous circles by his feet.

"A good guest?"

I said nothing, hid my smile in the blanket.

"But I feel… well, guilty now," Brithelm said, head bowed. "As if I guided poor Firebrand to misfortune and doom simply by feigning an interest in his surroundings."

"Nonsense, brother," I remarked. "Look at the simple mathematics of the situation. Firebrand had wrestled you down there, was more than willing to put an end to you once he had the opals, and brought me to the caverns of the Que-Tana with all kinds of lies and subterfuge. It all adds up, Brithelm, and your little courtesy does not compare to his malice and weakness and greed."

I discovered I was good at this. Having spent nigh on twenty years in explaining away my own misdeeds, I could explain for others with the skill of a surgeon.

Brithelm relaxed beside me, rose to his feet. All the lights that were to shine in western Solamnia that evening were shining by now.

Five days it took us to get back to Castle di Caela. For the most part, Ramiro served as our guide, the only one among us who had any idea as to the way back.

He had practiced his leadership until it had become almost glamorous. After all, he had guided forth the hundreds of squinting, cowering Que-Tana, many of whom were seeing the moons and the stars for the first time in their benighted lives, into that shadowy grove in the foothills, where they stayed until Longwalker joined them late that evening. There, as the campfires of the Que-Tana glowed warmly, Ramiro, Brithelm, and I took to the plains, leaving behind us a wandering family reunited, a rudderless people brought to a strong and kindly guidance.

A guidance not only Longwalker's. For Shardos had stayed with the Que-Tana, for reasons we did not yet understand. Brithelm wept openly to say good-bye to the old juggler, and Ramiro and I, though trained to be starched, stone-faced models of Solamnic restraint, left with a catch in our throats as the old man sang a song at our parting, its melody cascading down the hillside after us. From Wayreth Forest it was supposed to have come, and Shardos claimed he had pieced it together from the song of the birds there. I do not remember it all, but I remember one part-"Here there is quiet," it went,

"Here there is quiet, where music turns in upon silence

Here at the world's imagined edge, where clarity

Completes the senses, at long last where we behold

Ripe fruit never falling, streams still and transparent

"Where the tears are dried from our faces, or settle,

Still as a stream in accomplished countries of peace,

And the traveler opens, permitting the voyage of light

As air, as the heart in repose this lasting day."

The very next afternoon we saw them, on a rise behind us, in the distance at the feet of the mountains.

The tall form that walked at the head of the column was no doubt Longwalker's. Silhouetted against the western sky, against the rapidly fading sunlight behind him, he waved at us, lonely and elegant on the horizon's edge.