Roger Taylor - The waking of Orthlund

It was a correct decision, the hall being more spa-cious than the City’s main sick house nearby, but… the noises…

With an effort he dismissed the memory. He was no healer. He could do nothing other than what he had. He’d used his skills to ensure that hurt and healers were brought together as quickly as possible along with such medicines and other comforts as could be had, but still…

He leaned against the door jamb. No buts, he thought. What price would not any of those poor souls now pay just for the simple privilege of standing unaided and pain free, feeling cold stone against their faces? Just being here he had all that life could offer him, for all the terrors and trauma of the day, and the hazards of the future.

He looked again at the torchlit work dwindling into the distance, and then at the busy but reasonably ordered activity going on around him.

What flexible creatures we are, he thought. As indi-viduals we break and buckle, but as a whole we simply sway, move with the wind, and then swing back to accept whatever new circumstances have arisen.

And what a wind had blown today! It had blown away the valued heritage of generations and ushered in an age the nature of which could only be described as unbelievable.

How could it have happened so quickly? The King, risen whole again only to be cruelly cut down. The Queen and Eldric fled, Dan-Tor suddenly revealed by the hand of a mysterious Orthlundyn as a creature of legend, and laying waste great stretches of the City in his pain and rage.

And the result? Ordinary people picking up the remains. Seizing and holding tightly their own fears for the sake of others. Rushing to familiar places to pick up familiar tools, then soiling precious clothes, heaving and sweating, burying old animosities and rivalries as they dug out friends and strangers alike.

And me? Dilrap’s thoughts turned to himself. He had defied his King and then witnessed his murder, faced the gaze of Oklar and survived his spleen, taken control of Mathidrin officers and troopers and organ-ized them. And now?

Now, he was tired. Tired and glad of it, because his work was not yet finished. It would probably be some hours before he could rest for more than just a few brief minutes and by then he would be exhausted. Now he could remain immersed totally in the needs of the present. The very horrors of the day had given him the opportunity to put time between them and his full realization of them. A strange irony. Had the City not been torn apart, he would have retreated to his cham-bers to tremble and shake himself into who knew what state of terrors, thereby demonstrating his worthless-ness and virtually ensuring his extermination. Now, he was something different. He had made some kind of a decision without realizing it.

He looked down and watched his foot idly making patterns in the dust. His fatigue was protecting him still, he knew, numbing him against the reality that was to come. He may yet prove inadequate for the role he had apparently chosen, but he saw no other choice. He would learn. Had he not silently aided the Queen for months? The memory came almost as a surprise to him.

Abruptly, in its wake came another, older memory of his father cutting down a tree on their country estate. The tree had been diseased and had to be removed for the sake of its neighbours. On some whim his father decided to tackle the job himself and Dilrap remem-bered being sat down by his mother to watch him while she pursued the mysterious household tasks that mothers pursued. Dilrap remembered vividly the cruel accuracy of his childish perceptions.

Almost from the first stroke it became apparent that the task was not going to be as easy as his father had envisaged. The axe bit only slightly yet succeeded in jamming itself. Dilrap watched as his father passed through many moods and learned many things as he laboured painfully at this unfamiliar task. Overall however, had been a daunting determination, at first smiling and vigorous but later increasingly grim. Finally it had happened. One, two, three strokes of the axe and with a slight groan the tree was falling, crashing down and bouncing slightly as it hit the ground. And there was his father, reluctantly triumphant.

Dilrap nodded to himself. The City had not fallen suddenly at all, nor had he suddenly discarded the worst excesses of his old dithering self. Dan-Tor had chopped silently and relentlessly at the City for years, but he too had learned little by little how to lie and deceive to protect the old ways.

Dilrap remembered also that the tree stump had sprouted again the following year and been a regular hazard to the unwary at night-time.

The setting sun swept a bright yellow light across the undulating plains of Orthlund, casting the long, deep shadows beloved by the Orthlundyn. It washed through the streets of Pedhavin and in its slow progress released those secrets that had been hidden within the village’s carvings to await its special touch.

Many of the villagers were walking the rambling streets and watching the changes being wrought by the shifting sunlight. Some were gazing in admiration at the work of long-dead masters; others were looking critically at their own work or that of their neighbours. A few young apprentices were being marched round to examine some of the ‘classical features that can amp;mdashpay attention amp;mdashthat can be obtained, with care, in this special light.’

High above, in one of the towers of Anderras Darion, Tirilen shaded her eyes and peered down at the village. She could see the little block of apprentices moving through the streets like a tiny phalanx of infantry, cutting its way relentlessly through the browsing villagers, just as they in their turn cut through the streaming light of the sunset to make their own moving shadow-forms.

The sight brought sad thoughts to mind. Her uncle, Isloman, head askew, looking at some grotesque shadow he was casting on the uneven ground, and chuckling to himself. Then, alongside the worried sadness of that memory, the darker, more frightening image of the Orthlundyn training for war. And training very effectively, the Castle grounds ringing with the practice of swordsmanship, archery, and many other forms of combat. People being selected for special training and disappearing for days on end out into the country or into the mountains. Areas of land that had been tended for generations by loving hands being churned and broken by marching feet, as cavalry and infantry training developed apace.

And the injuries she had learned to treat! She grim-aced. It needed little imagination to extend the injuries that resulted from the accidents of over-enthusiastic training into those that must occur in the grim, hate-filled reality of combat. And there was worse.

Healers must enter into the pain, Hawklan had said, but there was pain and pain. The pain of a broken limb or an accidental sword gash was bad enough, but the pain of a mother whose son had fallen to his death in the mountains, or the pain of considering where this work was leading: they were different.

Everything was changing. Everybody was changing. She herself was different in a way she could not begin to fathom. And her father, Loman… She turned away from the window and looked down at him sleeping soundly if somewhat ungraciously on a nearby couch. He had changed too. He was a little leaner in the face and such small layers of fat as had decorated his massive frame had turned into muscle many months ago, and…

Loman opened his eyes wide as if he felt Tirilen’s gaze on him.

And he was different inside. Younger, more alert somehow. More sensitive, yet harder. Like everything else, he seemed to be… waking. That was it. Waking. The people, the Castle, even the Great Harmony of Orthlund seemed to be more alive.