Марк Энтони - The Cataclysm

“I know. They’re coming,” I said. “I must hurry. Finding the truth is saving my life. The druidess said so.”

I stroked the ears of Mateo, the largest of the dogs, who looked up at me solemnly, his thick shoulders pressing against my legs until I staggered a little at the weight. I had no thought of how small I was—how things far greater would press against me when I stepped across the threshold into the early winter morning.

Mother moved slowly aside as I passed into the pale sunlight, her fingers brushing softly, mutely against my hair. I gave her a smile and a long hug, and she assured me of her own safety. In the sled lay an old hide bag, big enough for the harp and the book, a loaf of bread, and a wedge of cheese. I tossed everything in and moved off, as quickly and silently as I could.

One of the dogs barked as I lost the cottage behind a cluster of blue Aeterna branches, and the high wind shivered faintly at their icicles like the vanished notes of a song. Above the hillside nearest my home, four long shadows fell across the trackless snow.

There were other adventures that led me back to the peninsula—a wide arc of years and travels across the continent, Finn’s men at first only hours behind me, then less constant, less menacing the farther south I traveled. I sent the dogs back to Mother soon and traveled alone, sometimes working for a while at jobs where nobody knew me or thought they knew me, where nobody cared that I never removed my hood.

It was a year, six seasons perhaps, before I realized exactly what it was about the song I was searching for.

It has long been practice that when a bard travels and sings, his songs are attended, remembered, and copied by those in the regions nearby. If a song is a new one, it carries to still farther regions by word of mouth, from bard to bard, from orator to folksinger to storyteller to bard again.

It is a tangled process, and the words change sometimes in the telling, no matter how we try to rightly remember. The old lines from Arion’s song I heard in Solamnia as The Prayer of Matheri Merciful Grammar of Thought I had heard in the small town of Solace as The Prayers of Matheri Mercy, Grandmother of Thought and the southern lines made me laugh, distorted like gossip in their passage across the straits.

For I had the book with me, and within it the truth unchangeable. As I traveled, I knew I would come to a place when I would hear those scratched and worried lines of my father’s—the lines about Pyrrhus Alecto, about Lightbringer and history and glory—but I would hear them in a different version.

And I would know at last what Pyrrhus Orestes had altered.

Across the Straits of Schallsea I once stowed away on a ferry. The enraged ferryman discovered me under a pile of badger hides, and he threatened to throw me overboard for evading his fee. He relented when he pushed back my hood and saw the scars from the burning.

“Firebringer,” he snarled. “Only my fear of Branchala, of the curse upon bard-slayers, stays my hand from your murder.” I cherished his greeting. It was the first of many such conversations.

Over the grain fields of Abanasinia I wandered, in a journey from summer to summer and threat to threat. Three times I heard “Song of the Rending”—once from a minstrel in Solace, again in the city of Haven from a seedy, unraveled bard who had forgotten entire passages about the collapse of Istar, whereby his singing lost its sense, and finally from a blind juggler wandering the depths of the plains, whose version was wild and comical, a better story by far than Arion’s.

The minstrel and the juggler repeated Father’s altered lines word for word. But the juggler recited them with a curious look, as though he was remembering words contrary to those he was speaking. Although I asked him and asked him again about it, he would tell me nothing. Faced with his silence, I began to believe I had imagined his discomfort, that it was only my hope and dreaming that had expected to find the missing lines.

And so, back across the straits I sailed, in the summer of my sixteenth year, and again the ferryman called me Firebringer, cursing me and spitting at me as he took my money.

On Solamnic shores once more, I started for home, but discovered that no village would shelter me on the journey. “Firebringer,” they called me, and “Orestes the Torch,” meeting me on the outskirts of the hamlets with torches of their own, with stones and rakes and long peninsular knives.

Some even pursued me, shouting that the fires would die with the one who brought them. Like the ferryman, like Finn, they thought I was my father.

To the north lay the great Solamnic castles—Vingaard and Dargaard, Brightblade and Thelgaard and DiCaela. Each would take me in of a night for the sake of my grandfather. These families would nurse me on occasion, for my scars burned with growing intensity as the seasons turned and the fires to the west raged and the years passed by me. Sometimes the knights let me stay for a week, perhaps two, but the peasants would clamor, would talk of traitors and firebrands, and I would be asked to leave, would be escorted from Solamnic holdings by a handful of armed cavalry.

The knights would apologize there at the borders, and tell me that their hearts were heavy for me … that the welfare of the order and the people took precedence … that, had there been another way, they would have been glad to …

In all those high places, I asked after Arion’s song. Solamnia was, after all, the bard’s sanctuary, the harp’s haven. All of the schooled poets had retreated to these courts, and all knew the works of Arion of Coastlund.

I showed around the scratched and amended passage near the poem’s end. All the bards remembered it, and remembered no other version. As I sat alone in the vaulted hall of Vingaard Keep, my thickened hands strumming Father’s harp in the vast and echoing silence, it almost seemed to me that the walls shuddered with my clumsy music, the one string still and always missing.

In my seventeenth year, the peninsula had burned clear up to Finn’s own holdings.

Out of the stronghold of his lair in the seaside caverns at Endaf, from which his horsemen could harry the trade routes north from Abanasinia and his notorious ships, the Nuitari and the Viper , could find safe harbor, Finn terrorized the cape and covered the shore with the husks of schooners and brigantines, off course in the smoke from the mainland.

It was rumored by some that an ancient evil had returned, in those brief years before the War of the Lance. Finn was one of those who harbored them, the populace whispered. For in the depths of his seaside cavern lay an intricate web of still larger caverns, tunnel devolving on tunnel, the darkness slick and echoing. This was the legendary Finn’s Ear, where it was supposed that all sounds muttered in shelter of stone eventually and eternally circled and spoke. At the heart of Finn’s labyrinth was said to lay a monster, his black scales glittering with cold malice and devouring acid.

They said that the beast and the bandit had struck an uneasy truce: Finn soothed the monster with the music of well paid but exhausted bards, and, lulled by continual song, the great creature received in turn the company of the bandit king’s uncooperative prisoners. And as to the fate of those poor wretches, even the rumormongers were silent.

In the rough border country between Lemish and Southlund, cooling myself in the high foothills of the Garnet Mountains, I pondered the looming necessity of actually going to Finn’s Ear, where the bards were singing and the caverns echoing. It was the only place I had not searched for the song.

Hooded as always to hide my livid scars, I crossed that border and stalked through the burning peninsula, keeping the towers of Caergoth to the north as I traveled toward the little villages in the west. My route took me within Finn’s own sight, had he cared to leave his rocky throne and look west from the beetling cliffs.