Gods of Earth (33 page)

Tiny hands, warm on my cheeks, awoke me. I smiled and opened my eyes, and beheld my daughter, smiling over me, her eyes shining. My son bounced onto the bed behind her. I reached out and embraced her, then both of them—and then leapt from bed when I came full awake and knew then that they were there, with me.

“How came you here, Beo and Una?”

“Mother brought us,” Una told me, laughing. Their soulburdened lemur scampered sideways about the room, roused by their laughter. It hooted once, very loudly.

I dressed quickly and hurried into the great hall. There Wealtheow stood, before a great fire that she had stoked on the
ashes of the previous night. I ran to her, my children following, and took her shoulders in my hands.

“How good it is to find you here! It is a wonder!”

It gives me some happiness, these ages later, to know that I let my heart win that moment, and I hugged her. Yet still I feel a heavy shame that before this day I let anger long separate us.

“A wonder!” she laughed. “Surely you knew I would come when I heard your call.”

“My call?”

“Wulfanga told me. But—what—you did not ask for us?”

“I asked for all three of you with every breath, in every moment that passed, but was too much the coward to call out. No, Wulfanga did not as I asked, but as I needed and wanted and had failed to do.”

We left the children by the fire with a heaping breakfast, and then climbed the black stairs to the room where Wulfanga had slept. We meant to thank him. But the door was ajar. The room empty.

“How could he betray me twice?” I growled at Wealtheow. “Perhaps even more times.” I had come in love. Now rage shot through me.

“There’s a note.” Wealtheow picked up a folded parchment sheet that lay on the pillow. She opened it and read, “Dear Treow and Wealtheow: By the time you read this note I shall be dead. A willing sacrifice to Lethebion. A deserved punishment.”

She looked up at me. “Oh, Treow.”

My mind raced. What would it be? “Leap off the roof of the tower?” I asked aloud, moving toward the window as I said it. “But no: Wulfanga had asked to stay the last night in his old home, the small hut by the grass plains.”

“The terrorbirds,” Wealtheow whispered.

We sprinted from the room.

The fastest way to the plateau was on horseback. In the stables we found all the horses were there—Wulfanga had not taken a steed. This was good, for if he had not left too early in the night we might catch him on the path.

We rode hard up the narrow trail, through steep hills.

“Why would he do this?” I called to Wealtheow. “What does the note say?”

But though she tried, we rode too hard for her to draw out the note and read the rest of it.

The path rose into light, and then opened out of the forest and onto the bright grassland. The tall blades tossed in the wind, glistening still from the night’s rain, and brushed the knees of our horses. The empty green stretched off to mountains in the east, and to far-off forest in every other way.

“I don’t see him,” I cursed.

Wealtheow was reaching for his note, her eyes still on the plain, when she pointed. “There!”

Standing in the grass: a single black figure, and beyond it two other dark shapes stepping slowly forward. We took off at a gallop.

As we approached, we began to see the figures clearly. Wulfanga walked, his back to us, toward two giant, sleek birds that slowly, slowly, stepped through the tall grass, watching him. Two terrorbirds, surely a mating pair. Each a full head taller than Wulfanga, wingless, covered in green feathers that could fade into the grassland when they crouched. Their huge legs slowly lifted, planting a massive talon in the sod with each step. They tipped their ax-beaks toward each other as they stalked up on Wulfanga. They likely thought that he was sick, to approach them like this. But still they moved slowly, bent forward, in their careful hunting way.

The hammering of our galloping horses reached them then. The birds bobbed their great heads up, frozen as they watched us. They waited a long time, perhaps mistaking the horses for some dumb
prey beast of the plains, before one, then the other, sprinted off at shocking speed.

Wulfanga sat down in the grass, weeping. We circled him, then leapt down.

“Why did you stop them?” he moaned. But he could not hide his relief. It would not have been an easy death. And no death is welcome.

“No more lies,” I told him.

“No more lies,” he answered.

“No more betrayals.”

“Oh, there can be no more betrayals after what I have done.”

I held out a hand. “Here. Get up on this horse. I will ride with Wealtheow. Our children are alone. We return to Aegweard to be with them.”

We stood on the hot stones before Aegweard, while our children and their lemur played in the sea.

“Why?” Wealtheow demanded, after the young ones ran beyond hearing.

Wulfanga fell onto a stone bench alongside the tower. “Have you yet let yourselves see that your dreams are hopeless? Have you let yourselves see that while men squeeze onto every last shovel of dirt, the course of life is doomed? The soulburdened that you create, Wealtheow, will have no strength against this greed. And Lethebion is too small to thrive, and none will let it stretch beyond that cursed wall.” He pointed at the white towers of the Sæwall.

“I grant no such thing,” Wealtheow said. “I still have hope.”

“You were wrong to hope. But now you may hope.”

I grew restless. “Wulfanga, you’ve clashed against our hopes before. You were banished for it.”

“And Wealtheow?” he asked me. “Why was she nearly banished? For lack of hope?”

I growled. “I did not say the guild lacks fools. That does not mean you are right. Tell us what you’ve done. Do you need some help to set something right?”

“It’s too late. It’s already done.”

“Nothing the guild does cannot be changed if I fight hard to make it so. We can—”

“No! Not the guild. That’s all past. It’s too late for the guild. For now.”

“I don’t understand,” Wealtheow said.

“I have done a dreadful thing. A wonderful and dreadful thing. I have made the plague, and I have released it.”

He looked at me as he said this.

“What plague?” Wealtheow whispered.

The world seemed to fade around me. I could not believe what he had said. Not yet. Oddly, I found myself looking around, to see if there was another nearby who could have heard these words. I felt the eyes of history upon us—I felt the gaze of the dread doom of the future. But we were alone.

“What plague?” Wealtheow repeated.

“A plague that makes most men, and most women, barren.”

I sat—fell—back onto the broken stone wall that ringed the small area at the base of the tower. A monkey screamed in the trees nearby. The hiss of the surf could just be heard above the soft wind in the trees. The laughter of my children rose up to us from the sun-sparkling sea.

“Why?” I whispered.

“You know about this?” Wealtheow demanded of me.

“He had talked of it once. Long ago. He swore to me he would never talk of it again. Still, it was one reason I let the guild leaders banish him.”

“You knew about this,” she said again.

“As did you. You heard him threaten it before also. Years ago.”

“But I thought he was.…”

“Yes. So did I.”

“It is done now,” Wulfanga said. “Do not fight over it. Neither of you could stop me.”

“Why?” Wealtheow said. Her voice was bitter.

There was no force in Wulfanga’s voice as he answered. “You know why. I have no hope for men. They will crowd out every last being on Earth. It is their way. Nothing you are doing can change that.”

“You will cause war,” she said. “Great wars. Death. You will set everything back. You may have finally ruined the Earth.”

“It was already ruined.”

“No!” She took two great steps toward him and slapped him. Hard. “No! You will tell what you’ve done. We will damn what you’ve done. And you will yield up the cure. Then you will pay for your crime. The Lifweg will go on with its work.”

“There is no cure. And I have no need to confess. I have no doubt that soon, very soon, the truth will be known. Many people helped me. They are not good guild members. They will talk. Soon. The fighting will begin soon.”

“You have killed us,” I whispered. And then I stood, and gripped his collar so tight that I choked him. I dragged him over to the wall and shoved him over, so that his weight balanced on the edge, wobbling over a deadly drop to rocks below.

“You’ve killed the Lifweg. Lethebion. The soulburdened.” I shook him. Wealtheow grabbed his leg to keep him from falling. She shouted my name. But I was always ready with wrath, even if Wulfanga was the one who had only wrath.

“You have killed our children. My son and daughter.”

“Rrrr-herrrr.…” he choked out through the biting twist of his collar. “Oth-th.…”

“Please,” Wealtheow said. “Please, Treow.”

I pulled him back and threw him onto the ground. He slowly raised himself off the rocks, coughing. A fierce red welt ringed his throat.

“Hroth tower,” he choked out.

“What?” Hroth tower was deep in mountainous forest far to the north, near the middle of the Earth, not far from Yggdrasil. In the first days of the guild we had used it. It had been forsook to the forest, unused we thought, for more than ten years.

“I have prepared it. Take my ship and your children and go. I will stay here, and await the end.”

“We would not leave our guild.”

“You shall be blamed. I shall be blamed. But not your guildmates. You must take the children and go. Erdwight can arrest me. She can turn me over to… the Orderlies, perhaps, would be best. But you must go this hour. Go at least until the truth comes out, so that you are not killed in anger.”

There is little more to be said of that time. We could not forsake our guild, and so spurned his plan. We gave Wulfanga to the Orderlies. It did not help, not for long. We stayed on the island, while hatred grew. We stayed when it was attacked, and stayed when the Lifweg finally fought back, and many died. We stayed until it was hopeless, and we were among the few who still had breath. We stayed until nothing could be saved, until we had no choice.

And then we fled. We fled to Hroth Tower.

After we had given Wulfanga to the Orderlies, I read the letter that had been crushed in Wealtheow’s pocket.

Most of it confessed to his crime. But he ended the letter with this:

I know what you will say of me. How I ill-wielded craft that was not mine by right. You are a dour man. But I ask you: as every single human comes to have vast strength—like those gods that the
witches are said to brew in their damned tower—can we prevent any of the harms this can do, without becoming as strong ourselves? Has Wealtheow not admitted this, by leaving the Lifweg to join the wolflings who mother the soulburdened? We cannot thwart strong ills but by wielding great strength of our own.