Kelven's Riddle: The Mountain at the Middle of the World Page 11

  There were magnificent grand halls and mansions throughout the lower reaches of the city, but the upper levels contained living quarters of every size and quality. One day, while exploring the topmost levels of the city, he found a small room cut into the rock out of which, leading further into the mountain, there ran a narrow passage that accessed a winding staircase. The staircase went up and around just inside the flank of the mountain. As it ascended, there were windows providing light and air cut through the decreasing thickness of the rock to the world outside. Eventually, the structure broke free of the mountain and there were windows on all sides. A hundred feet or so above that and the staircase ended in an observation tower with a view of the entire valley.

  A large bowed window nearly encircled the rounded room, supported every few feet by steel rods set into the rock. In the center of the room there was a thick glass set in a bronze metal frame and mounted on a bronze tripod. On the opposing sides of the metal frame there were handles by which the glass could be turned in any direction. When he looked through the glass, faraway parts of the valley were magically brought close. His respect and admiration for the genius of the city’s ancient inhabitants grew exponentially with this discovery and deepened even further the mystery of their absence.

  Over time, Aram developed a habit of examining the countryside with the glass and he often saw wolves roving the valley in packs. Consequently, as he grew more confident in his fighting abilities and roamed further from the walls of the city, he became ever more certain that contact with one or more of the packs was inevitable.

  For the time being he lived and slept in the armory or in the high tower but he was always looking for a suitable residence toward the middle section of the city. It was in this region of the city, as he was exploring it one day, that he discovered the infirmary. Set back from one of the small parks there was a squat building with tall windows on either side of a central door. The structure was fully detached from those around it.

  Inside, Aram found a bright room with walls covered in colorful frescoes. On the back wall above a stone table in front of a doorway that led into an interior room, there was a fresco of a man and woman administering to a prone and obviously distressed child. All around the other walls were the depictions of dozens of leafy and spiny plants. It took him only a glance to discern that the plants were medicinal in nature and that the man and woman treating the child were healers. Below the depiction of each plant, written in the ancient script, there were words, no doubt giving the name of each plant, or perhaps a description of its uses. He determined to find and identify most of these plants, assuming that they grew in the valley and the surrounding hills, and learn their medicinal value.

  He found a great treasure in the interior room. Lined up along the back wall of this room was a row of large stone urns. Most were filled to various levels with different colors of dust but one contained salt. Exposed to air and moisture, it had hardened into a solid chunk but when Aram chipped it with his knife and gingerly tasted it, he smiled to himself with satisfaction. He had found one more vital necessity of life.

  And there was more. While sifting through a heap of trash in a corner, he dug out a variety of small tools from the rotted mess, including steel needles of various sizes and several small knives. They had rusted together over the eons and most were ruined but he was able to save a few of each. The needles would help him make badly needed clothing—if he could somehow acquire leather—while the knives would be useful for many different tasks. Among the trash there were also wedge-shaped pieces of flint of various sizes and round ironstones—tools for making fire. For a man born into the utter poverty of slavery, Aram was now wealthy beyond his wildest imaginings.

  One morning, as he was pruning the tangled fruit trees, he heard a fierce commotion out on the main thoroughfare that went toward the pyramids. Grabbing his sword and two spears, he sprinted toward the sound. A half-mile from the city he came upon four wolves fighting over the carcass of a dead deer and anger surged inside him. Charging forward, he raised a spear and when he was close enough, hurled it into the nearest beast. The metal point caught the wolf just in front of its rear haunches and with a shriek of pain it went down.

  Instantly, the other wolves attacked the fallen one in a mindless frenzy and consequently did not see Aram. He switched the other spear to his throwing hand and ran close enough to thrust it into the neck of another. At that the remaining two wolves turned to attack him. In his fury, Aram ran straight at them, driving his sword right down the throat of the nearest wolf and using its body to shield him from the other’s teeth while he extracted the blade.

  Then the fight was between him and one wolf, a large, dangerous-looking beast. They circled each other for a few moments until the wolf, overwhelmed by the smell of the blood of its dead companions and sensing mortal danger, turned to run. Aram’s fighting spirit was running hot and he would have none of it.

  He knew he couldn’t run down the fleet wolf so he jerked the spear out of the body of one of those he’d just killed and hurled it after the fleeing wolf with all his might. He missed. Cursing in anger, he retrieved the spear and turned back to examine the three wolves he’d dropped. One, a large male with steel gray fur, was still living, so he dispatched it with the blade of his sword.

  It was only after the heat of battle had dissipated that he had time to be surprised by his feelings. He was amazed to discover that he was no longer afraid of the savage beasts. He would always be wary of wolves of course, because of the danger and the threat they represented, but he would never again fall prey to witless fear.

  He went over to examine the carcass of the slain deer. It had been torn severely, but it had been freshly killed and some of the meat was still untouched, and there were some fairly large pieces of usable hide. He used the sword to cut away the portions the wolves had shredded and carried the rest with him back into the city. He knew nothing of cooking meat but he had learned to make fire as a boy and now he had obtained a serious source of nourishment quite by accident.

  Carrying the meat into the city he went to the infirmary and laying it out on the stone table, skinned the hide away and rubbed the meat all over with salt. Then he went to the fire pit in the great hall and started a fire. Piercing a piece of the meat on the tip of a narrow sword he held it over the flame and roasted it. It turned out to be wonderfully satisfying. He realized that if he could get the deer populations to increase in the valley, meat could become a major part of his sustenance until such time as he could consistently grow and harvest crops.

  First, though, he would have to drive out the wolves. This he set about to do. It had become clear to him that the beasts had no real sense of tactics or strategy and were susceptible to hard, sharp steel that was guided by a focused mind. For his sake and that of the deer populations, he made a conscious decision to go to war and rid the valley of the scourge of wolves.

  Before going on the offensive, however, he needed to limit access to the city. He collected stones from the ruin of the northern staircase and carried them to the southern staircase. At the top of the stairs he built a defensive wall, eight feet high, anchored every three or four feet by buttresses. He left a narrow opening along the side nearest to the city for him to enter and exit. Wolves could enter there too, but only one at a time, and Aram was perfectly willing to kill them one at a time.

  After completing the wall he grew even more serious in his practice with the weaponry. He found a grassy levee that the ancient people had built and practiced throwing spears into the soft earth from various distances, standing, crouching, and while on the run. For sword practice he abandoned the large dead tree that he had nearly severed and instead used the stump of an apple tree that lightning had killed. He did this daily without fail. He soon grew very comfortable with the sword and learned to control the trajectory of his spears so that they entered the target at a downward angle and had greater impact.

  One day, while exploring the depths of the city,
he found a room that had evidently once been the private armory of some very important men. Lying in heaps below the remains of pegs in the wall were components of metal armor of various shapes and sizes. The armor was covered with the grime of ages but when he wiped it with his hand, the shining black metal came clean. Like the swords and the spear points, it was made of a type of metal that didn’t rust. And he found a helmet that fit him, black, with short bronze horns that extended upward on either side of the crown. The helmet had a slatted visor that opened and closed over his eyes.

  He dug through the heaps until he found pieces of armor that fit his chest and upper legs and arms. The leather ties were long gone but he was certain that he could find a way to use deer’s hide to bind the pieces of armor to one another and to his body. And there was an even more important discovery. Lying flat in an alcove in the back of the room was a sword of such lightness that even though it was longer than the one he was used to, it seemed to almost wield itself. It felt as light as a stick of wood in his hand.

  He took it outside and swung at a branch of the dead tree he had been using and to his amazement the blade slipped through the old hard wood as if it were butter. This, then, became his sword. But he still longed for a bow, and as the spring turned into summer, he studied the fresco of the man with the bow and began to experiment with construction. It was a hit and miss proposition for he only had the one fresco of a man with a bow fully drawn. It was some time before he figured out that the bow itself was either straight or curved slightly in one direction and that it was the drawing of the wood against its natural strength that launched the missile.

  In the meantime, he went hunting and he found wolves. Usually they traveled in packs of three to five and he began to attack them in an ever-widening circle out from the city. At the first, he had good luck, destroying pack after pack but as the summer waned, the wolves learned that the man with the steel was to be avoided. It became increasingly difficult to ambush them. Even when in the midst of a feast, they were wary and watched for him.

  Still, he reduced their number in the immediate vicinity of the city and the deer populations began to come back. This provided him not only with an occasional source of fresh meat—when he was lucky enough to take one by stealth, a difficult, painstaking process—but provided him with hides to tan as well, a procedure that, once he’d conceived of it, he learned through dogged trial and error. The tanned deer hides gave him ample supplies of leather straps and simple clothing and he created a proper scabbard for his sword, leaving his hands free as he wandered.

  As he traveled throughout the valley all that summer, one by one, with a few exceptions, he found and identified the plants depicted on the walls of the infirmary. Discovering their relevant uses was a tricky thing but he was able to identify one plant in particular that, when crushed and bound next to a wound caused by a knife blade or a rock scrape, caused the blood to clot and cease its exit from the injury. Also, upon use, it appeared to prevent infection. He developed a habit of always carrying a supply.

  One day he made it all the way to the river in his search for wolves. The river was peaceful here in the center of the valley, dropping from pool to pool through gentle riffles. It was seldom more than twenty yards across and was only very deep through the middles of the pools. Fish moved in abundance in its clear depths.

  Aram was moving cautiously through a stand of tall, thin saplings that bordered the stream when he pushed one of the saplings aside and it snapped back sharply, striking him in the head and nearly dropping him. Rubbing his forehead, he examined the sapling more closely. The saplings were tall, slim, and straight with tiny leaves and they were very strong. Drawing his sword he cut one and tried to break it over his knee. It was impossible. Quietly, he rejoiced; perhaps, he thought, he’d found the material to make a bow.

  He cut several of the saplings and took them back to the city. With his knife he cut one to about a five-foot length and began to work it. He left it stout in the center and tapered it toward the ends. He cut a notch to nock the arrows just below the halfway mark and shaped the ends so that they would hold a braided thong of some kind.

  When he was finished his creation resembled the bow held by the man in the fresco except that he had no string and no arrows. There was an obvious solution to the lack of arrows. He simply used some of the smaller, straighter saplings and cut them to an approximate length. Then he forced points on the ends and cut notches in the other. But he had no idea of how to attach feathers for fletching the missile like those on the arrow in the fresco.

  After completing his rudimentary bow and an even more rudimentary arrow, he stripped bark from various trees and species of brush and tried to weave a bowstring but nothing worked. Everything he tried snapped when pressure was exerted. It was while he was making himself clothing from deer hides that he had an idea that addressed the problem. While he was cutting the finished hide into strips so that he could make ties to fasten his armor it occurred to him that by cutting it into very thin strips and weaving them together he could make a rough bowstring that might handle the strain.

  This, then, he did, and though his finished product looked only vaguely like the bow in the fresco, when he nocked an arrow and let it fly, the arrow sailed far out over the courtyard, though its flight was erratic. There was still the problem of controlling the trajectory of the missile but he’d made a weapon. As he watched the arrow thunk firmly into the ground about forty yards out from the wall, he felt like shouting for joy.

  Now, he had only to acquire some feathers, shape them properly, and devise a way to attach them to the arrows so he could properly direct their flight. Until he found a way to solve that problem, however, he would have to hunt wolves with sword and spear, and over the next several weeks, that proved sufficient.

  The wolf packs were growing wary of him and began to avoid the twenty or thirty square miles or so immediately surrounding the city. The deer became more plentiful in that area while the wolves nibbled at them from around the edges. They knew his scent and had learned to stay clear of him.

  For a time, Aram was content with the sort of truce that existed, which no one had agreed upon but just happened. He spent most days tending and improving the area near the south stairway; pruning the trees and weeding everything from the ground that either wasn’t familiar or looked like a weed.

  As summer wore away and autumn approached, there came to be a kind of perimeter fixed that extended from the hill on the left to a broad upland on the right or south and from the city to the river. Inside this twenty-five square mile area the wolves did not come and Aram rarely ventured outside it. There were even a few late fawns born inside it and a small herd of a thirty or so deer fell under Aram’s protection.

  He labored inside the city as well. He decided to move into the small apartment below the tower, and he wove a bed of willow bark and constructed crude shutters for the windows. As the year waned and nights grew cooler, he brought up wood and used the fire pit on a regular basis. His old life as a slave was fading into the past with amazing rapidity.

  By the middle of autumn, things were pretty well in hand. He harvested the few apples and plums the scraggly trees produced as they ripened and stored them for the winter. Some of the vine plants he had tended so carefully proved to be squash and the sweetroot he’d separated and cultivated had grown to a substantial size. The grass he’d suspected was a type of grain turned out to be so. But it didn’t produce enough to eat. He allowed the heads to mature and then stored the grains in a dry willow basket in one of the basement rooms. When the next spring came, he intended to open a plot of earth and seed it properly.

  He became adept enough with a spear to bring down a couple of deer for his winter’s meat. It was an arduous task because he had to get close in order to make a clean kill and the methods he employed to hunt wolves did not work on deer. Wolves were predators themselves, more used to hunting than being hunted, so the only real advantage on either side of the issue was fou
nd in Aram’s skill and steel.

  Deer, on the other hand, possessed the highly developed senses of prey animals and were accustomed to being wary. Their senses of hearing and of sight were acute and when startled they ran like the wind. Aram was forced to develop new strategies of stealth and silence and he learned to stay downwind when stalking them. Ultimately, however, he was successful and took a young buck and an older doe.

  Though not actively hunting wolves, he continued to practice with the long, light sword. And he finally perfected the art of tanning hide and utilized the deerskin for not just clothing but bedding as well. He also made for himself a pair of high-topped moccasins for daily use as his old boots were approaching the end of their serviceability.

  The informal truce with the wolves held until late fall.

  One day as he was scouting outside his protected area along the sinking river to the south, he surprised six wolves at their feast. He watched them from a hill as they snarled at him but held their ground. He was about to move on when he looked more closely at their partially consumed quarry.

  Sudden recognition of the savaged forms made him ill enough to vomit.

  They were eating two humans. Even at that distance, he could see the distinctive lines of human bones and skeletons. In sudden rage he charged off the hill into the midst of them. He carried only his sword but he made it sing, killing two with his first strokes and wounding a third. But these wolves were used to humans as prey so they attacked. Aram backed up against a wall of rock and let them come straight at him, dispatching them one at a time.