Roger Taylor - The waking of Orthlund

‘I’m sorry I frightened you,’ he said. ‘But you fright-ened me too. We didn’t mean to disturb you and we mean no harm. We’re going now.’

His voice seemed to echo strangely into some far distance, and then return to swirl agitatedly around him until it reshaped itself into, ‘Stay, carver.’

He turned and looked at his companions. They were looking slightly surprised, but this was obviously at his conduct rather than at anything untoward they had just heard. He turned again to the darkness.

‘You must speak so that my friends can hear you also,’ he said.

This time there was no echo. Just silence. He stood for some time watching and listening, but there was no response. Turning, he walked back to the others, feeling rather foolish.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Something odd’s going on here, but I don’t think it’s going to serve any useful purpose to inquire into it.’ He bent down and picked up Hawklan. Gavor flew up onto his shoulder.

‘Please stay, carver.’

This time the voice was clearly audible to everyone. Tirke gasped, and Dacu turned quickly, his eyes scanning the whole cave in one sweep and then peering intently into the far darkness; deeper now that the torches had been withdrawn.

He glanced at Isloman and with a flick of his head, indicated the entrance. Then he started, his face pained and his hands reaching up involuntarily towards his head.

‘Stop it,’ roared Isloman furiously. ‘Whoever you are and whatever you want from me, you’ll gain nothing by assailing my friends.’

Dacu straightened up and shook his head. His face was pale. ‘Isloman, let’s get out of here while we can,’ he said urgently.

‘No. Please stay,’ came the voice again. ‘We’re sorry. It won’t happen again.’

Isloman hesitated; there was doubt in the voice. ‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘What do you want?’

‘The bird knows us,’ the voice said. Or was it voices? Isloman thought. ‘We wish… to talk.’

Isloman lowered Hawklan to the ground gently and rested him against the cave wall.

‘About what?’ he demanded.

There was silence for a moment then from the dis-tance came a sound like the passage of a long shallow wave over a pebbled beach. As it reached him, Isloman felt his mind awash with sounds full of complex images of Hawklan and Oklar and Anderras Darion. There were subtleties and nuances in the sounds that were like those that could be found in the finest carvings. He recognized the signs; there were no words for what they wanted to say.

Looking round, he could see that Dacu and Tirke were similarly affected. Gavor was shaking his head and muttering something unintelligible but obviously derogatory. The horses too were suddenly restless. The Alphraan were keeping their word. Everyone else in the cave could hear what he was hearing.

He waved his arms. ‘We don’t understand,’ he said. ‘We haven’t your skills. You must find the words, however crude, if you wish to speak with us about… ’ He bent forward and laid his hand on Hawklan’s shoulder.

The sounds and the images faded into silence, leav-ing the three men looking at one another, bewildered. ‘It’s difficult,’ said the voice plaintively, after a long pause.

Despite himself, Isloman laughed at the tone. ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘But you can come down to our level; we can’t rise to yours.’

There was another silence, then, ‘Who is he?’

‘Who is who?’ Isloman replied.

‘The one you carry. The one with Ethriss’s sword that you’ve shown with Oklar outside Anderras Darion.’

In each of the words, Ethriss, Oklar, and Anderras Darion, came the crowding subtleties and complexities that had swept over the listeners before. To Isloman it seemed that each individual word was merely the glowing centre of a great sphere of shifting lights and shades of meaning. One day I shall carve such meaning, he thought.

‘This is Hawklan,’ he said simply, laying his hand on Hawklan’s shoulder again. ‘But how did you know of Anderras Darion and Oklar?’

Immediately his head was full of the sounds of amusement which seemed to focus on his surprise that they should be acquainted with Anderras Darion. Laced through it, however, were threads of distaste at the gaucherie of his own knowledge of the Castle as enshrined in his speech.

‘We know of Anderras Darion,’ said the voice, openly amused, but without amplification, then, almost grimly, ‘We know of Oklar also. But why should you cut his image thus?’ Isloman felt his eyes drawn to his carving. ‘And who is… Hawklan?’ The voice tested the sound, Hawklan, and found it wanting. ‘And why does he carry Ethriss’s sword?’

‘Hawklan’s a healer,’ Isloman said. ‘Perhaps much more, we don’t know. He came with Gavor out of the mountains some twenty years ago. I cut what I cut on a whim, following the song of the rock. Dan-Tor… Oklar… came thus to us at Anderras Darion, bringing a corruption with him. When we sought him out in Fyorlund, he… hurt my friend, as you see. And many others far more cruelly. We’re going back now to Anderras Darion to find help to oppose him.’

His last remarks, however, were swept away on a great, confining roar. It did not, however, overwhelm him as the previous noises had. Rather it seemed that many voices were quarrelling amongst themselves and that he and the others were merely inadvertent eavesdroppers.

He looked at Dacu and Tirke. The latter seemed nervous and uncertain, but Dacu just pulled a wry face at him and shrugged his shoulders. Then he craned forward as if listening intently to the cacophony: Isloman half-closed his eyes and did the same.

Though most of the noise was unintelligible to him, he began to catch some semblance of meaning in it. It centred around what he took to be Oklar, and the images that swarmed around that name made him shudder. So vivid and accurate were they that he found himself again cowering behind the failing Hawklan at the palace gate as such of Oklar’s power as was not being reflected back upon him by Hawklan’s sword tore around them to rend its terrible pathways across the city. His mind was filled again with the roaring and screaming that dominated that memory, and his whole soul was filled again with the same terror.

But there was doubt and dissension in the noise of the Alphraan. It was a debate. An argument, in fact. Its content ebbed and flowed. The sound ‘Oklar’ was denied. It could not be, Oklar was destroyed, millennia ago, as were Dar Hastuin and Creost and Him. Terrible, hate-laden resonances in this last sound chilled Isloman even further. Then, images of human treachery and deceit were formed, and Isloman felt himself and his companions becoming the focus of the debate.

He began to feel alarmed. There were strange whis-pering elements threading through the debate. Elements that formed into a vision of him fighting with Dacu, fighting with such ferocity that both would probably die. Elements that showed Gavor and Hawklan crushed underfoot and the horses scattered, foaming and terrified, across the mountains.

Dacu, too, seemed to sense these sinister undercur-rents and, catching Isloman’s eye, nodded towards the entrance of the cave again. Isloman bent down to pick up Hawklan again.

‘Stay,’ said a voice abruptly, cutting with stark clar-ity through the whirling mosaic of sound. The debate faded as suddenly as it had arisen, but Isloman could not determine whether it had been concluded. The voice was not the one that had spoken previously. It was grim and serious, and though Isloman felt no restraint upon him, he waited silently. Gavor stood protectively in front of Hawklan.

‘Oklar is dead,’ said the voice, its tone unequivocal. ‘He was destroyed utterly. Why do you profane our… ’ The word eluded Isloman. House? Life? ‘… with his image? And from where did you steal the blessed Ethriss’s sword?’