Kelven's Riddle: The Mountain at the Middle of the World Page 14

  Aram had many questions he wanted to ask these men. Where were they from? How had they gotten here? Were they free men? Instead—

  “What are you doing in my valley?” He heard himself ask gruffly, and was instantly surprised that his strongest feeling was a sense of trespass at their presence inside the boundaries of his land.

  “Your valley?” The young man looked shocked.

  “Yes, my valley. What are you doing here?”

  “Well,” the young man stole a glance at his companions and then looked back at Aram with caution dampening the naturally open expression of his features. “We’re hunting deer. We usually don’t come this far from home, but wolves are overrunning the whole of the country near our lands and deer are getting scarce. We didn’t mean to trespass.” He looked at Aram curiously. “I didn’t know anyone lived in this valley.”

  Aram studied the men for a moment. They all looked healthy, fairly well fed, and were armed with short swords. On the ground near their fire were small bows and quivers of arrows, somewhat shorter than his bow but deadly looking none the less.

  “Why didn’t you kill the wolves with arrows?”

  The young man shrugged apologetically. “We were eating supper. They caught us by surprise.”

  Aram frowned. The idea of being taken unawares had become foreign to him. “They took you by surprise? How could you let that happen?”

  Without waiting for an answer, he walked over and retrieved his bow and examined the deer carcass, torn by the wolves. Then he turned to the men, and as he did, he sheathed his sword.

  “Who are you?”

  The young man with copper hair spoke. “I’m Findaen, son of Lancer, the Prince of Derosa. This is Jonwood, Mallet, and Wamlak.”

  Aram nodded at each man in turn, the short, tough looking Jonwood, the enormous, barrel-chested Mallet, and the dark-haired, lean Wamlak.

  “How is the hunting?” He asked, taking care to lessen the level of hostility in his voice.

  The men visibly relaxed. Findaen left the others and came over near Aram. “Not good. We’ve seen many more wolf tracks than those of deer. We were hoping to carry twenty or thirty pounds of meat each back to Derosa. If we found good herds, I hoped to make a few more trips before fall.” He glanced at Aram. “We really didn’t know that this was your valley.”

  Aram nodded grimly. “But it is. And I don’t like others being here.” He was surprised to hear himself say it, but knew that it was true. “Where’s this place called Derosa? Is that your village?”

  “Yes.” Findaen nodded and pointed southeast. “Only, it’s more like a large town. It’s forty or fifty miles, maybe a bit more, beyond the hills.”

  “You’re a long way from home.” Aram observed. “And you have problems with wolves in your country?”

  Findaen’s pleasant face fell. “We’re being overrun, as are all the deer herds everywhere, especially in the last few years.”

  “Why don’t you eradicate them?”

  “What—wolves? You mean, kill the wolves?”

  Aram looked at him and said nothing.

  Findaen shrugged and glanced away. “You don’t just kill wolves. Well, as we’ve just seen, you certainly do. We do, too, when we can, but they’re as big as a man, some bigger, and we’re farmers mostly, or were. We’re not really trained to kill something as big and ferocious as a wolf, and not really equipped.”

  Aram glanced at the young man’s scabbard. “May I see your sword?”

  “Sure.” Findaen drew his short sword and handed it over, hilt first.

  It was made of poor quality steel, barely more than worked iron, and showed damage along the blade’s edge where it had struck something hard, bone, probably. Aram handed the poor weapon back to Findaen and looked in the young man’s eyes.

  “Are you a free people or servants of Manon?”

  Findaen’s features contracted in anger and he spat on the ground. “We’re still free so far, but we’ve lost much land. That’s why farmers find it necessary to go hunting for deer. Manon’s gray men have pushed us almost completely from the plains. Derosa is in a high valley, fairly secure against attack but the planting season is short and we have to supplement our harvests with hunting.”

  Aram turned from him and walked a short distance away, thinking. He liked these men, despite their trespass into his valley. And for some time now he had missed the company of other humans, but still he was reluctant to readily entangle his life. And for reasons that he couldn’t quite understand he didn’t want anyone to know of the existence of his city.

  “I’ll make a deal with you,” he told Findaen.

  “A deal, sir?”

  “Yes. Where do your people normally hunt?”

  Findaen swept his arm in a half-circle, indicating most of the country to the south and southeast. “Usually, in the green hills. In years past, they were full of deer. Now, each party we send out is often more concerned with avoiding wolves and staying alive than finding game. That’s why we crossed the river and came up through the pine hills. When we saw this valley, we hoped to find deer rather than wolves. And, well, you know the rest.”

  Aram walked to the fire and motioned for the men to gather. “Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll kill your wolves out of the green hills to my south and the pine ridges to my east. But you must stay out of my valley. Your people must stay to the south of the two rivers in the green hills and, in the eastern hills; you must not hunt farther north than the lone spire of rock that stands between the rivers. In return, I will kill all the wolves from that whole country. Is that acceptable?”

  Findaen stared at him. “You’ll kill all the wolves?”

  Aram nodded. “All of them.”

  The four Derosans glanced uncertainly at each other. Findaen asked in an incredulous voice. “Would—would you like us to help?”

  “No.” Aram shook his head decisively. He stood a minute in silence, thinking. Looking at Findaen, he asked. “Can you track a man?”

  Findaen indicated the slim, dark-haired man to his left. “Wamlak can track almost anything.”

  Aram nodded. “Good. I’ll camp to your south tonight and start in the morning. I’ll leave good tracks for you to follow. When I find deer, I’ll kill them and leave them in trees for you to find. Maybe that will help you.” He looked hard at the four incredulous men. “I’ll keep my bargain. In return, you must stay clear of my valley.”

  Findaen nodded slowly. “I assure you, sir, we will never enter your valley again except by your leave.”

  Aram spun and went into the night, leaving the four astounded Derosans staring after him.

  IX

  For the remainder of the summer and into the fall, until it became absolutely imperative for him to return home and harvest his crops, Aram wandered to the south through the wooded hills and hollows, the western borders of which he’d admired so greatly when he first escaped into the wilderness. He found and destroyed nine separate wolf packs, forty-six wolves in all. Most he slew in surprise attacks, in direct conflict. The wounded, he followed and dispatched with mercy. Touched by evil though they were, he was loath to let anything suffer.

  As he worked to the west into the swath of higher, wilder country along the river’s canyon, he eventually came to the cave of the wolves that had chased him into the maelstrom. There were thirteen of them now and he slew them all. When he came opposite the mountain, where he’d slept on his third or fourth night of freedom, wolf tracks became scarce, and he turned back to the east to hunt out the pine covered hills on the east of his valley.

  He killed deer for the Derosans when he could but only when there were at least three to a herd and he didn’t slay females that might be carrying young for the coming year. Occasionally, he checked back along his trail and found that the Derosans were as good as their word. They found every deer he left them, and several times he spotted them, but they never saw him and he was reluctant for reasons he didn’t understand to make contact.

  One e
vening, just after sundown, he slipped close to them as they were seated around their campfire. As he was deciding whether or not to approach, he picked up their conversation and realized that they were discussing him.

  “Who do you suppose he is, then,” wondered Mallet, the big man. “And where in the world did he come from? Has he always lived in that valley?”

  Wamlak poked at the fire with a stick, sending sparks flying into the twilight. “He acts like one of the ancients.”

  “The ancients are all gone, thousands of years ago,” protested Jonwood.

  “I just said that he acts like one. He has no fear and he kills wolves with apparent ease. And look at his weapons—I’ve never seen any like them.”

  Findaen stirred uneasily. “I don’t know who he is or why he’s in that valley, but there is something of the ancients about him. You know that it is said that there is a high city of the old kings somewhere in that valley—over on the other side, I think, near the mountain. My father said that his grandfather had actually seen it, years ago, and that it was still haunted by spirits.”

  “Maybe he’s a spirit,” whispered Mallet, and his eyes grew round as he stared into the fire.

  Wamlak gazed at him with mild disgust. “He’s as real as you or I, Mallet. I see his footprints every now and then. Spirits don’t leave footprints.”

  “Who is he then, Wamlak—tell us.” Mallet said defensively.

  Wamlak stared into the fire thoughtfully, then lay back and gazed up at the stars. “Maybe he is one of the ancients, who survived somehow. It’s said that they didn’t die—they could be killed but they didn’t die.”

  At this, the men fell silent and Aram turned away and slipped into the night.

  By the time the first real frost came, he’d driven off or killed most of the wolf packs in the pine hills from few miles south of the southern river north to the spire of rock that stood at the point where the two rivers diverged, the southern river cutting eastward straight on into the hills and the valley river turning sharply back to the north. He left a final deer there for the Derosans to find and built an “X” of deadfall to warn them to keep their bargain. When he turned toward home, he stopped leaving easy tracks, walking only on hard ground and using streams and rocks to cover his trail.

  The leaves were turning and the apples were ripe when he came back to the main street before his city. He’d been gone so long, living in the wild, that he cautiously explored the city for any sign that anyone had been there but he found no evidence of people or wolves. The city did have one new occupant, however. A young bear had moved into the old wolf’s den under the south steps.

  It was small and black and was terrified of Aram. He decided that if it didn’t bother him, it was welcome to stay and he made a habit of leaving a few apples near the grotto for it to find. Aram worked hard to get all his crops in before the first big freeze or snowfall, and only just made it. Everything had produced well, even the wheat, but he’d been gone long past its prime and had lost most of it. Bread would be a luxury again rather than a staple.

  Throughout that winter, he continued to work on improving his lodgings in the city, perfecting his weapons, and organizing the armory and infirmary. On days when the weather was moderate, he scouted the immediate area for wolves but saw none.

  His sixth winter in the valley passed quietly. Aram was now twenty-nine years old.

  At the first break of spring, he made several wide surveys of his valley and found two deer carcasses at two different locations near the river beyond the pyramids. He studied the tracks near both kills and discovered that it was a sizeable pack of large wolves. This concerned him. He’d thought that he had eradicated all the large wolf packs in the valley. But these tracks, when he followed them, led back across the river to the east.

  When spring fully came, he finished his planting and packed a pack with apples and dried meat and his little bit of bread and went across the river into the hills east of the city. He was tiring of the killing. As much as he despised wolves for what they did to people and to the deer, he had come to regret the killing of them even as he saw it as a necessary thing. He wondered whether, if the evil that touched their existence could be lifted, there could be some kind of harmony brought back to nature and the creatures that dwelled in his valley.

  Crossing the river, he found a draw that wound back up into the forested hills that had a substantial stream issuing from it. As he ascended, he found no evidence of the wolves and began to hope that they had done the wise thing and departed his lands.

  But then he discovered the tracks of a large pack of ten or twelve animals crossing the draw from south to north. As he climbed further into the mountains, he came across occasional carcasses of deer. This didn’t alarm him, for he didn’t hunt these mountains nor did the Derosans. But then one afternoon, on the slope of an amphitheater below a pass between two high peaks, he discovered the carcasses of two entirely different animals that the wolves had slain and eaten.

  These were enormous skeletons with large, elongated skulls and strange rounded hooves. The legs had been long and the animals had stood higher than a tall man’s head. Aram didn’t know what they were but there was a mystical familiarity to their structure and it appeared that, in life, these had been magnificent creatures. He was overwhelmed by a curious grief that these animals had died. The old anger rose in him again, and when he discovered that the general route of the wolf pack led up into the pass and over the mountains to the east, even though it was not his country, he decided to follow them and eliminate them for what they had done.

  As he climbed the steep slopes, he remained vigilant for any movement of dark shapes against the pale gray rock of the mountain pass above him but saw nothing. He camped that night in a windblown copse of trees a few hundred feet below the summit, scattering two concentric circles of arrow points around his camp. The high, thin air was cool, but he did not start a fire. In the morning, as soon as it was light enough to see, he ate a cold breakfast, gathered his arrow points and moved on.

  The high pass was rocky and devoid of vegetation, well above the timberline, and lay between two very tall gray peaks. The wind, as it blew through the pass, was bitter even though it was late spring. As he passed between the high ramparts of stone, he found banks of snow in places where the warm sun never shone.

  He stopped just below the summit of the pass and looked back. Never before had he been able to see the whole of his valley lain out before him in panorama. It was about noon and the brilliant sun angled down from its position in the southern half of the sky, delineating the black, rose, and gold rock of his mountain far to the west. He could not make out details of his city but he could see its brilliant rectangle at the mountain’s base and the main thoroughfare that ran almost directly towards him.

  Turning to look east, out beyond the forested slopes that fell away below him, he saw a vast, high, rolling country, broken here and there by gentle ridges with serpentine lines of trees growing along their spines, and the whole of the country was carpeted by a lustrous green. It stretched away from him toward the east farther than his eye could see, and was bounded far away on the north by high, gray-topped mountains like the ones that bordered his valley and in the distant south by gentle, timbered hills. It was a broad and wide land, all of it beautifully green. No doubt, if they hadn’t all been slain by wolves, this was a country for deer, or any other animal that grazed on grass. He thought about the skeletons far down the draw behind him and wondered if those great beasts had come from this wide, grassy land.

  The tracks of the wolf pack led down through a steep, wooded cut, and Aram once again gave chase. There was water here, fed by the high snows, tumbling down in a headlong rush. Here on the eastern side of the mountains, the woods were deep and lush and cool, with many more fir and spruce than pines. Throughout the morning, as he rapidly lost altitude, the weather warmed toward the making of a fine spring day.

  Noon found him still far up the mountainside and
with the necessity of caution that prevented a blunder into the wolf pack; it soon became obvious that the day would wane away before he reached the valley floor.

  At nightfall, he found the brow of a ridge that extended out from the side of the mountain and ended in a steep precipice. It was crowned by a stand of tall sweeping firs. After making certain that it could only be accessed from the mountainside, he scattered his arrow tips and camped, once again without making a fire.

  After eating, he lay for awhile listening to the sounds of the forest around and below him and gazed up through the sweeping bows of the giant firs at the stars. They had never shone as bright and clear out on the plains of his youth as they did in this high thin atmosphere. Out over the broad land to the east, hanging in the perfect blackness of the heavens just above the horizon, there was an elongated circle pattern of red stars with a long slash of bright white stars extending from it halfway across the sky. His father had told him once, long ago, that it was the Glittering Sword of God.

  As he lay watching it ascend into the sky from the east, he fell asleep.

  He woke before dawn and ate another cold breakfast. As soon as it was barely light enough, he gathered his points and descended the ridge into the hollow below and crept down the mountain. It was his experience that wolves tended to fuss among themselves until late into the night and seldom awoke before full sunrise. Often because of this habit of theirs, he’d been able to fall upon them unexpectedly in the early morning.

  He had no such luck this morning. Sunrise found him still among the firs of the mountainside following a tumbling, cascading stream. An hour after sunup he found where the wolves had passed the night. He was not far behind them now but still it was disappointing. He’d hoped to catch them and slay them somewhere along the route to the pass as a warning for all wolves to avoid his side of the mountain.