Chương 306: 3.7

Alder led them up into the foothills of the southernmost mountains of Viznove. Along a trail wide enough for four horses and with a grade sufficiently gentle a half lame mule could pull a cart up it. It was what anyone else might have mistaken for an old road perhaps recently cleared. But it was not. Jewel's senses told her how incredibly fresh it all was. The stones of the cliff had been cut and split. Boulders ground into gravel, sand, soft loam and clay dredged and spread over it.

Oftentimes by Alder's own hands! What felt like a dirt road hard packed by years of travel all bore only two kinds of footprint. The same feet, hands, fingers and toes pressing at the edges. But it had been done so artfully and naturally as the earth fit into the stones as if from long years settling. It seemed smoothed by years of rain and wind and time. Yet Jewel could feel where roots from moss and grass and one time a whole tree were still finding a proper fixture in recently overturned dirt.

Jewel could hear the sweet aches from the tree that Alder had uprooted from downriver miles away in order to replant it here. And even more astoundingly there was barely even a hint of any kind of sorcery or other working! What sparse parts of this newly made way into the mountains that were not singing with the direct contact that Alder had made with them spoke softly of simple tools of wood, stone or bone that it held!

The only faux flame or miracles she could even sense in the work of the elf and its road were more akin to the natural settling of a wood. Not the sharp intrusions of the heavens or commandments of even aged sorcery. And the work was still new. The youngest portions of the trail (the dirt and mosses the elf replanted) was three days since last they were touched. Right before the unseasonably late rain they just had. The effort was astounding! It had been most of the hungry summer since they last saw Alder.

But Jewel had seen the years and men it took to dig far less stone then this road must have required. The Elf had done what should have been the labor of a hundred men over months in mere days! And all of it was apparently for their benefit? To give a 'proper gift'. Not even that. This path felt solid enough to remain for years. But she suspected Alder had just made it so their horses would have a convenient route. The more Jewel looked along the path the more confused she became.

Not a lick of sorcery, not a touch of flame, not a cut of miracles. Just the world joyously delighted in the touch of an elf. Where was all the leftover rock? She found no sign of it. How far had the elf hauled so much stone? It was blatantly obvious when they reached their campsite for the evening. A fire pit had already been prepared and stocked with good dry timbres but not yet lit. It was a wide place of open packed dirt in a circle of towering stones backed by the stripped bare cliff.

The largest of the obelisks, half as tall as Jewel's length. Where before the road had been fresh, barely days old this place was different. She could feel the ground's age here. She could taste the air and smell the roots of the mountain. These stone monoliths were wakeful, but they had only recently been stirred from a deep slumber buried and bundled in dirt and earth which had covered them to well over their highest points. And their surfaces had been worn smooth by ages before that earth had entombed them.

Until the markings they now bore again freshly cut and sharp must have been all but invisible. They were so incredibly old. Older than any worked stone Jewel had felt. Older than anything in the capital. Ancient beyond her reckoning. And now every single stone pillar shone in the warm light of the late summer sun, polished as if freshly quarried. Patterns covering every single one of them just recently deepend. Lines almost like claw marks wrapped around each over and over. In whorls and loops and great circles.

As if a dragon even larger than Jewel had artfully worked over them like a particularly aesthetically inclined cat or sphinx that had been filled with both a desire for sharpening her claws and a need to be as beautiful as possible. There was also, of course, a feast's worth of beasts killed no later than that morning and left to drain their life's blood from slit throats into still green wood bowls.

And those vessels joined by other similarly carved bowls piled high with bundles of herbs, an entire household's store worth of various roots and other summer produce. Alder bowed to Jewel in a sweeping gesture and then spoke loud and clear to her party. With a cadence of ritual and song." Make your rest, take up the bounty of these woods and let us prepare! For feast and song under the stars and skies will we have in the night! Come children! To the beasts! To the flesh! To the lore of old!"

And with that Jewel could not find it in herself but to nod to her entourage. It was a strange feast, not like any she had ever attended. She'd tried to stand apart from it like was proper for a countess, but Alder simply took her at the elbow and guided her with a grip that was far too firm and a presence that was much harder to resist then so slight a creature should have been able to manage against a dragon. Alder was not pulling her along, but it felt like resisting the pull of the earth without her flame.

And then with her husband, Smithson and even some of her footmen the Elf guided her through the work of cooking and preparing the meal! Jewel was a lady! She'd naught cooked a thing for herself in her life. That's what she had Dariusz for! She'd hardly ever even used a knife! But Alder had slipped a piece of shaped stone with an edge sharper than any blade she had ever seen into her hand and guided her in the cutting of the boar. The stone knife should have felt foreign, but it seemed almost eager in her palm.

It had fit her grip perfectly and with Alder's guidance she had cut portions from one of the forest swine (half the size of the terror boar from her youth by her reckoning). Alder stayed with her, until the elf no longer needed to gently grab or press her arm to nudge her from slicing through the bones with her knife. Then the elfslid away to assist one of the footmen with weaving the herbs together.

And then Alder was among Dariusz and the other staff working on the fire and fetching the water from a mountain stream somewhere further uphill. It was a dizzying experience and yet everything around the camp suddenly sang with the rhythm of it. A familiar deep pull that Jewel recognized far too well now. She had felt it a few times before, but most of all she had felt it when she first learned to dance. And when she had grasped the art of spinning.

Jewel surprised herself when she realized she had started crooning a melody as they worked. Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more. But not as much as when Dariusz and Paul had joined in. Neither of them were particularly practiced singers, Her husband for all his admirable qualities only dared try to carry a tune when he was half lost in his cups. But the strange surprise festiveness of this whole affair seemed to suit how rough both their voices were.

And with her own humming rumble it all seemed to come together to be less bad then it normally would have been. Alder was back there with her just before she had run out of pig to cut and was then guiding her along to something else she had never done before. Fetching water. And the elf sang with her as they walked into the woods. Not with any particular words. Just sounds that were almost like brooks over smooth stones and almost like rain and also the simple throaty calls of a child's laughter.

And the evening came upon them like that. The elf never left any of them alone for long. Never spoke a word, there was no speech to be had that did not lilt into the song of the place around them. The sun faded but the fire was kindled and rose to flare just as the last light dipped beneath the northwestern mountains. The shadows of the stones around them danced, the rhythm of the song seemed to have caught those last rays and held them in the fire itself.

Like the sun had been placed in their hearth and now burned for them alone that night. And they cooked the meat and other harvests of the land, the smell of herbal smoke roasting in the fire followed by the crisp sharp wind of the sky where it touched the wall of the vault behind them. Cold and harsh despite the summer day. But soothed and gentled by the fire's heat.

And then at last the music seemed to still, to let them all settle, Jewel found herself suddenly worried, had the fae found a way to bespell them all despite her own immunity to sorcery?! But Alder stood before them, in front of the fire. The hum of action burned in Gem's muscles but left a strangely warm soothing from the labors they had done that day. Jewel had lost track of what her smaller self had done for much of it somehow, but Alder had been there for her too.

Ah she had been helping cut up some kind of pale root with a sharp sweet scent. The elf stood there now in shadow from the fire, all of them settled around it. And then it raised a strange instrument and stroked it. Brushed it, made it sing, and then the elf placed it in the hands of Jewel's smaller self and spoke to her the words that were not any she had ever known. Gently tugged and pulled on her finger tips and wrists with light brushes from the fae's own.

Gem moved and like the elf had done all that evening up until sun down the guidance settled her and she found the rhythm. Another instrument was brought forth, a new sound joined the first which flowed from Gem's astounded fingertips and lips. Not complicated, a simple pattern. Strange foreign music. But then Alder gave this one to Paul. It guided her husband. And then there was another and another. Murial, Dariusz, each Footman and horse minder. Every member of Jewel's staff.

Under the shining stars and in the seemingly solar firelight Alder produced an instrument for each of them. Some were mere rattles, others were flutes, some strange things of strung gut that seemed so insubstantial to barely be there at all. But to each of Jewel's party a different piece of the music was given. Each seemingly prepared just for them. Some waned, some stumbled but like with the singing before the chorus of them all helped pull the stumbles of the few back into rhythm.

What should have been noise and chaos remained in harmony. Perhaps the chaos was harmony? Jewel had never heard anything like it. And then with a swelling and falling mass of strange fae music rising and falling around Alder like the wings of some strange beast of sound the Elf began to sing. She knew the words, but more importantly she could feel them." In the time long before the heavens had folded themselves down to the sharp points of stars."

Alder swept a hand out and like a spear it threw their gaze to one of the far stones, and in the play of the shadow of those fingers the grooves under fire light danced. And sparked and caught and it was only then that Jewel tasted the first hints of fauxfire and sorcery. But it landed only upon the stone carvings, swimming and flowing over them. It was like the sky was revealed in the place a stone slab once stood. But that was no sky Jewel had ever seen. It ran in a wash of colors, like rainbow rivers.

Corruscating walls and sheets and curdling whorls. A sky as bright as the blue of noon day but mingling in all the colors. The sight was wondrous and terrifying. Like a prismatic inferno. And then Alder's shadow passed away and it was just carved lines on a stone pillar catching fire light again. The fae voice rose again." In the time when the only people were the one people who were all people together that walked across the world and knew all the land and beast as kin.

And fought not among one another but for love, honor or the joy of it." Alder flung its hands and shadow again carried their eyes and Jewel could almost swear their hearts to another stone. The touch of sorcery, of faux fire, of miracles from the stars was so delicate, so slight, it was just a thing of light and shadow upon stones barely changed and nothing more.

But it made the stone deepen, it made what were strange flickering illumination into figures, men and women, striding over hills, over mountains, making and shaping boats to move along waters. It weaved and teemed with figures. Alder had not used a single mote of faux flame or sorcery to shape the road here, to unbury these stones that had slept for so long. But the elf called on faux flame, the world and the divine will of the stars themselves now. Applying each in daubs and drops with the greatest care.

Only to change light and shade. To bring sight to the words. But it was done just as deftly as any act Jewel had seen the elf do. The vision of the stone was swept away as Alder danced, spun, twisted about the fire, contorting itself to clean and then change the scene, to draw their eyes back to the fire." A man and a woman came to a place where the sky and the earth met.

For they saw that though all the people were one and walked all the world they were but few and their children grew only under long and difficult struggles." Alder gestured out again.

"So they climbed to where the fire of the heavens rang. Where the cold beyond could bite the flesh." The stone showed the figures of a man with a beard wrought in hundreds of tightly wound braids so each seemed to almost curl like a snail's shell. A woman stood with him with her hair wrapped in bands of shining metal and they raised their hands up to the maelstrom of light that was the sky above them." The man would be remembered as Enmerkar and the woman would claim her name as Inanna.

And they were the first sky callers to be known by the people who were once the only people that were all people." Alder halted its words, its song. The music stumbled, grew discordant. But yet it rumbled on, and Alder's tone grew harsh and growling, suitably mingling and dragging the chaos of the inexperienced musical players into a rough new harmony." It is they who began the ordering of the sky, the sharpening of the heavens into the pointed knives of fates.

Although they wished nothing but good for all the people who were the one and only people. It would break their hearts with what came of their acts." The next stone was struck with attention, with a gesture. Alder's voice grew raw with grief, with pain, with long buried hurts. Jewel could only barely glance at the elf in the dark but even a glance showed the grief wracked across its face, the deep ancient lines of contorted pain and the tears streaming down its cheeks.

The face spoke not of some story from long ago. It spoke of moments witnessed. Of cruelties suffered. The scene on the stone showed the sky shrinking and twisting from the profusion of light and color into a sharpening of points. And then Alder made a gesture upwards, fae voice gave a shout and hands a clap. The music of the others was silent, the discord banished.

And then fixing all of them with a stare Jewel had only seen the shadow of in men left bereft in war Alder flung its right hand in a gesture behind Jewel. To the cliff wall they had passed on the way here and yet Jewel had thought simply scraped clear. But she turned now, she looked with her eyes and those of Gem's." From the Ordering of the Heavens and the sharpened fate of stars, was the loving gift of Enmerkar and Inanna and all they had hoped for granted. And it became the sweetest poison.

The people who were one walked from all over the world to join them under this deadly blessing." She could see the shadows of people walking to a valley, a place of rivers, of flowing water. She watched it become what looked like villages as shadows danced.

"Their kindest wishes, though, became the seed of a horrible sickness. The new children grew quickly, but they sickened, they died. But even as they fell ill, yet ever more were borne, children of children, each more stunted and bent then the last." What had been villages grew and merged, walls rose, buildings loomed. A city that made Kaeketeh, even the capital of Cantor Reborn, seem small loomed up in its valley and marshes. Reached out over the waters and into the distance of a far horizon.

Upon the cliff wall an edifice now loomed, carved out of fire and starlight. A heaving mountain, so ever growing that Jewel felt a fear it would fall over and drown them in its mass. It was a city and a beast, trembling, heaving and breathing. A thing of distant brick skin and glinting bronze teeth. With poisonous roots that were somehow also fields and canals. And all around its growth a desert of sand and corpses grew. Teeming in collapsing bodies, starving children and anguished faces.

A desolate sea of misery manifest creeping in from all sides.

"It is by the ordering of the heavens that they ultimately broke the people who were one and made many of them. Turned their children into rotting slaves, made ugliness out of beauty, It was by the promise and hope of the sky callers that Uruk was made." Alder clapped its hands. The terrifying, monstrously teeming thing that was at once like a fortress and a city and a ravening beast vanished in the sudden shadow cast by fae hands. When Jewel looked back to the fire the elf was nowhere to be seen.

But that strange voice whispered a last stanza to the wind. Voice creaking with sorrow." By the hands of Uruk do its children rot." Jewel stared at her husband, and then the rest of her entourage. At the bountiful feast left to them cooling in the night and the dozens of elf craft instruments. What was all of that?!