The Cellar Beneath the Cellar (Bell Mountain) (4 page)

“This is exactly what has happened, and it is a fact. It cannot be ignored.

“I have devoted all my life to laboring for Obann, toiling to lift it back to those heights of glory and greatness that it enjoyed a thousand years ago under the Empire. I take no pleasure in these facts that I have enumerated to you.”

“Of course not—but burn it all, what do they mean?” Lord Gwyll roared. “Another fact is that we’re about to have a war—a war such as none of us has ever seen in all our lives. We can’t be chauntering on about bells and prophecies at a time like this! There’ll be precious little time for pondering Scripture, if the Heathen get over our walls.”

They nodded at that speech, too. Reesh could hardly blame them. Until the day the bell rang, he, too, would have dismissed it all as medieval superstition.

“My lords, my friends,” he said, spreading his wrinkled hands on the cool, smooth surface of the table. “It is popularly believed that the ringing of the bell on Bell Mountain presages the destruction of the world. A few country presters who should have known better have already said so in their sermons.

“This belief is spreading like a fire in a dried-out cornfield. We have to do something about it. Who’s going to fight if he thinks the world’s about to end? Who’s going to work? Unless we find an effective answer to it, we will not win this war. We shall be unable to defend our cities; and then, whether God ends the world or not, it’ll be all over with us.”

Judge Tombo, fatter than Lord Reesh by fifty pounds, and twenty years younger, remained after the meeting was over and the others had gone.

“They don’t believe you,” he said.

They had adjourned to Lord Reesh’s private drawing room and ordered wine. The judge was the First Prester’s best friend. Between them, Tombo liked to joke, they’d buried a whole cemetery’s worth of men who would never be missed.

“This has to be stopped, and I don’t know how to stop it,” Reesh said. He noticed his hands were trembling: a bad sign. But his mind continued to grapple with the problem, nonstop.

“I agree,” Tombo said. “You alarm me, Reesh. If there really is a God, and the Scriptures tell the truth about Him, then you and I are in serious trouble—notwithstanding everything we’ve done was for the good of our country.”

“And ourselves!” snapped Reesh. “I’m old enough to be honest.”

“There doesn’t seem to be much we can do about God deciding to end the world.”

Reesh waved those words away. “Bah!” he said. “All the Scripture says is that God will
hear
the bell when someone rings it. It doesn’t say what He will
do
. All those prophecies about the end of the world were fulfilled when the Empire was destroyed. That was a thousand years ago, and we still haven’t struggled but a part of the way back to where we were when it happened.”

Tombo grinned at him. “But then you weren’t chosen First Prester for your attainments as a theologian, were you?” he said.

“I was chosen because I made it my business to be chosen. I never had time for all the holy books and commentaries. I did what I could to make religion a force for order and stability. Now I realize I should have done more. But it’s too late: every half-wit in Obann is prophesying these days. I underestimated the power of superstition, and its persistence.”

“I can’t tell my people to arrest everyone who prophesies,” Tombo said. “That’ll only make it worse. And yet we can’t ignore it, either.”

“You can help me find out who rang the bell, and take them into custody,” Reesh said. “I had a report of two children from somewhere up the river. They dreamed dreams and ran away from home to climb the mountain. I put my best man on it—Martis—to find them, follow them, and stop them. It seems he failed.”

“He never fails.”

“Well, this time he did! Someone rang that bell, probably those two children. The whole nation heard it, which is supernatural in itself.”

Tombo peered into his wine. “So we were wrong,” he said. “Wrong about everything.”

“Not everything! We were right to labor for order and progress. We were right to remove anyone who stood in the way. But now we are confronted with a supernatural event, one that threatens to demoralize the nation in a time of crisis. We must find those children and question them—exhaustively. The Temple doesn’t have the manpower for that, so you must help me, Tombo.”

“I will. I promise you that.”

“My task will be even harder. The entire Temple must be mobilized. Every prester, every reciter, in every chamber house across the land, must preach against these wild prophecies. We cannot deny the event, so we’ll have to dream up another explanation for it. We may even have to rewrite parts of Scripture. It won’t be easy to get everyone to agree to that.”

“Those who don’t agree must be replaced,” said the judge.

Reesh sighed. The wine had lost its taste for him. Even so, he relaxed in Tombo’s company.

“I’ve been thinking very hard,” he said, “and it may be that I have an idea, in very general terms, of what we must do.

“This Heathen confederacy is under one of their holy men from the Great Lakes. They say he works miracles.
We
will say he has a mission to destroy the Temple and all Obann with it; I don’t think we’ll be guilty of exaggerating.

“We will say that God Himself rang the bell to alert us to our peril and assure us of His aid, if only we do our part. We will say the world is not going to end, but our world, Obann, could end—if the people are not faithful to their Temple and their state, courageous in battle, and willing to endure grievous hardships.

“We will say this is a time of testing, the hardest test there ever was: so that through us God might show His power and His might. If we are worthy, we will emerge from the test renewed and blessed.

“This time, we shall say, the Heathen must be subdued forever, and all their filthy, false idolatries wiped out. We shall say God is angry because we have allowed the Heathen to flourish and let them alone on their side of the mountains. This time, we shall say, victory shall not be declared until our armies have crossed the mountains, thrown down all the Heathen idols, and planted our standards on the far shores of the lakes.”

Reesh ran out of breath, and stopped. He was surprised to find Judge Tombo grinning at him.

“They were wise to choose you as First Prester,” Tombo said. “We’ll restore the Empire yet.”

Obst started down the mountain two days before his friends, and they were not fated to catch up to him.

He felt strong; he made good time. His legs felt twenty years younger, forty years stronger. If the path he followed hadn’t been so steep, so twisty, so strewn with stones and tree roots, and so hemmed in on either side by briars and undergrowth, he would have skipped down the mountain.

Paying little attention to where he was going—as long as it was downhill, it couldn’t matter much—Obst had but little idea of where he was. Feeling strong and fresh was a great distraction. He drank in the clean, cool air, reveled in the song of birds and the chattering of squirrels. A blue jay followed him for some distance, scolding raucously. Under his breath, he prayed.

“Thank you, God, for giving me one more piece of work to do! Thank you for revealing to me, once again, the beauty of this world you have created, and now must uncreate. I trust in you, O Lord: use me to save souls before it’s too late.”

So occupied, he almost rammed into two men who suddenly stepped out into the path ahead of him. He stopped just short of a collision.

They stared at him. He stared at them. He knew, of course, that they were Heathen, guessed they must be scouting the ways across the mountains. But that was all he knew about them. The one was short, powerful, with dark skin covered with interlaced tattoos, and a shaved head with a single hank of thick black hair hanging down one side. He wore buckskin leggings and a string of many-colored beads around his neck, nothing more. The other was taller, without tattoos, dressed in brightly patterned woolen garments, bearded, with long hawk-feathers woven into his hair. Both clutched weapons in their hands: the tattooed man a hatchet, the feathered man a short spear.

“Excuse me, friends!” Obst said. “I didn’t see you until it was almost too late.”

“Who are you?” demanded the one with the feathers. “Who are you, westman who speaks the language of the Wallekki?”

The other glared at his companion. “Wallekki? Nay, he spoke Abnak!”

But Obst had spoken in the only language he knew, besides the archaic language of the Scriptures, the everyday speech of Obann. It amazed him to hear these Heathen speaking it, too.

He knew the Wallekki and the Abnaks were two different Heathen nations. There were many more, each with its own language or dialect, each with its own set of idols and distinctive way of life. He also knew they’d invented a common language, called Tribe-talk, with which the different nations could communicate. But what he heard from these two was Obannese, pure and simple.

The Wallekki menaced him with the spear. “Speak up, old man! Who are you, and what are you doing on the mountain, and how did you learn to speak Wallekki?”

“Abnak!” said the other. “Tell us, or you die here.”

“Warriors, there’s no call to be angry with me,” Obst said. “I’m nobody special—just an ordinary servant of God coming down from the top of the mountain. Well, almost the top. Didn’t you hear the bell when it rang two days ago?”

The two Heathen exchanged worried glances. “Aye, we heard it,” said the Abnak. “Even as I hear you speaking Abnak as if you were born to it.”

“A bell, you say?” exclaimed the other. “There is no bell here.”

“But surely you know the name we give the mountain,” Obst said. “I don’t know what name you have for it, but we call it Bell Mountain. That’s because there is a bell on top of it, erected two thousand years ago by King Ozias. He hung it there so that, someday, someone would come along and ring it, and God would hear it. That was the bell you heard. Someone has rung it, and God has heard it.”

It was not surprising that these Heathen men knew nothing of King Ozias’ bell.

“This is madness,” said the spearman. “When he speaks, I hear every word of it in Wallekki; and yet you hear it in Abnak. But he can’t speak two languages at once.”

“And when you speak,” Obst said, “I hear only the language of Obann!”

“We speak to each other in Tribe-talk,” said the Abnak. “I know not one word of your silly westmen talk.”

“Nor I,” the Wallekki said.

Obst understood, then, what had happened. It was all he could do, not to leap on the men and embrace them: but that would have been dangerous.

“Oh, it’s wonderful!” he cried. His feet felt like dancing. “You wouldn’t know this, my friends, but it’s all in Holy Scripture: God has given me the means to talk to you and to understand you when you speak to me. It’s not my doing, but God’s. For I assure you that I can’t speak a word of any of your languages, no more than you can speak mine. Nevertheless we understand each other! It is a gift from God.”

“We had better take him back with us alive,” the Wallekki said to the Abnak. “We have a proverb, ‘Leave the fighting to the men, and the gods to the priests.’ If we kill him here, the priests will ask us questions we can’t answer.”

“It’s bad luck to kill a madman,” said the Abnak, “and this old man is surely mad. Or else he is a shaman among his own kind. But it’s bad luck to kill a shaman, too.”

“I’m only too happy to go with you fellows,” Obst said. “God has given me a message to deliver to your people. If you heard the bell, you need to hear the message, too.

“My name is Obst, by the way. I don’t think I’m mad, and I know I’m not a shaman. For most of my life I’ve been a hermit. My home was in Lintum Forest, a long way from here.”

“We know where Lintum Forest is,” growled the Abnak. But the Wallekki introduced himself: “My name is Sharak, son of Ahal, the son of Eebra …” He went on for an impressive number of generations, while his companion scowled.

“And I am Hooq, the son of no one in particular,” the tattooed man said. “But I have washed my hatchet many times in the blood of Abnak’s enemies.”

“Of which I am not one,” said Obst.

Wytt’s keen senses—not to mention his being so close to the ground—soon picked up Obst’s trail.

“How did you come to have him as a traveling companion?” Martis asked the children, as they all followed the little hairy man. Martis had a scab on his hand where Wytt stabbed him the first time they met. He had not yet told the children about that meeting.

“Oh, we met him when we camped in some ruins one night,” Ellayne said. “There must have been hundreds of them on that hilltop, but you would never know they were there. Anyhow, we gave Wytt some of our food, and he just befriended us.”

“They’re in the Old Books, you know,” Jack said. “They’re Omah, which means ‘hairy ones.’ Obst told us all about it. God says, ‘I shall give your cities to the hairy ones.’”

Martis knew that verse, and others. The tiny man, the size of a large rat, completely covered with brown fur—the sight of it still made him uneasy.