Kelven's Riddle: The Mountain at the Middle of the World Read online

  Southward, the valley broadened and was eventually swallowed up in distant rounded hills. Somewhere down there, Aram believed, was the ridge he’d climbed to escape the wolves and where he’d been plunged into the depths of the mountain, probably by the river flowing through the valley before him.

  Immediately before him, twenty or thirty feet out from the railing where he stood and separated by a deep, narrow, paved alleyway running along the front of the great veranda, there rose a defensive wall of worked stone. The wall was about a dozen feet thick and was buttressed at regular intervals. Above each buttress, the wall was capped by square towers, many of which had crumbled. The top of the wall was accessed by arched bridges that extended out from the great porch and spanned the emptiness in ten or twelve places, though, like the towers atop the wall, most of these had crumbled as well and had fallen into the alleyway below.

  One of the bridges, however, larger than the rest and situated in the very center of the great veranda, was still intact. At the point where it accessed the defensive wall, there was a rectangular raised area atop the wall and a railed dais that extended a few feet beyond the far edge of the wall, providing an unobstructed view of the valley. Aram eased across the bridge and went to the dais. There was a platform in the center where it extended from the wall and he stepped up onto it and looked out over the valley.

  Below the wall lay a broad, paved parade ground from which a grand avenue led out from the city through the broken ruins of ancient buildings. These buildings, like the defensive wall, were not carved from living rock but had once been stoutly constructed of worked stone as was the retaining wall of the grand porch behind him that fell away to the alley below.

  The four or five square miles of the valley immediately before the city, outside the area of ruins that lined the great avenue, was mostly open and fairly level, though covered in several disconnected places by tangled groves of trees. It appeared that at one time there had probably been extensive farming activities conducted on this land that had included the maintenance of fruit orchards.

  Aram turned and looked along the defensive wall in both directions. It was anchored on each end, a half-mile away to the north and to the south, by strong, high towers with crenellated turrets that had once been connected to the city by substantial, walled bridges spanning the narrow alleyway. The southern bridge was still mostly intact, though damaged, but the northern bridge had completely collapsed; the ruins of it were piled in the dark alley below.

  There was, in fact, extensive damage to the defensive wall, to the towers, and even in some places, to the beautiful façade of the city behind him. At each end of the alleyway between the ramparts of the city and the defensive wall was a jumble of broken stone where at one time there had been retaining walls or gates. It appeared as if sometime in the distant past, the city had been besieged and at least partially breached.

  There were two unusual apertures in the railing on the valley side of the dais. The railing at this point was nearly chest high on Aram as he stood on the stone platform. The apertures, each about six inches in diameter, rather than being mere gaps in the railing, appeared to be the openings of, or access into, two fluted, metallic tube-like structures attached to the exterior wall. Curving down the outside of the stone and angling slightly away from one another, each metallic flute ended about seven or eight feet below the dais in a larger aperture of a foot or more. Aram could discern nothing of their possible purpose and after gazing out over the valley a few moments longer went back across the bridge and onto the great porch.

  Luxuriating in the wonderful sunshine, he explored the length of the grand porch. A few hundred feet either side of the bridge to the dais, wide stairs were cut into the level expanse of pavement, indenting the porch a dozen feet back toward the mountain. Each stairway dropped straight down the front of the retaining wall to the alleyway below. The steps at the north end were so badly damaged as to be unusable but the steps on the south end were sound and would allow him access to the valley.

  What had happened, he wondered, to make people abandon such a beautiful and livable place? What calamity had befallen them that had taken them all away? War, he thought, by the look of things.

  He would have liked to investigate the depths of the city but it was time to turn to the problem of food. Making his way back to the southern stairway, he went down the steps to the alleyway, climbed over the pile of jumbled stone under the turreted tower and made his way out among the trees. In just a short time, he found sweetroot growing in abundance. He sat on the grass and ate his fill and it seemed that the fibrous goodness went straight to his nutrition-starved muscles.

  There was water flowing out from culverts beneath the retaining wall of the grand porch; sparkling streams that meandered toward the distant river. The retaining wall beneath the porch was thirty or forty feet high and solid; there were no openings except for the small culverts that gave egress to the streams of water. He wondered, briefly, if there was a hollow space beneath the porch.

  The grand porch extended beyond the high towers that were at the limits of the defensive wall to the north and to the south for perhaps a thousand feet in each direction whereupon it turned back at right angles into the living rock of the mountain at the limits of the city.

  There were many interesting plants growing in wild profusion in the rich soil, including one grassy patch that resembled new wheat. And there were young vine plants that looked as if they might produce fruit of some kind, some just now putting out their first blooms, growing among the weeds.

  Too hungry and exhausted for the moment to explore the area below the walls, he gathered several tubers of sweetroot and went back toward the city. As he approached the south stairs he froze as his nose caught a familiar and dangerous odor. He’d smelled it once before at the entrance to the cave down in the canyon. It was the scent of rotting meat and in his limited experience meant but one thing.

  Wolves.

  Easing toward the stairs, his weary nerves twitching and twanging with fright, he examined the area around the tower. To the left of the stairs where the gate to the alleyway had tumbled into ruin, there was a place where the stone had collapsed in such a way that it created a cave under the piled rock. On the ground in front of the opening to this grotto, scattered about on the green grass, were deer bones. For several moments he stood frozen in abject fear that the wolves would usher forth and slay him. But there was no movement or sound in the darkness back under the rocks. They were evidently off hunting somewhere out in the countryside.

  Aram ran for the stairs and fled deep into the city. He charged up streets and occasional wide avenues that were lined with marvelous two and three-storied apartments, beautifully hewn from the lustrous stone, but he dared not take time to pause and admire. Overwhelmed with the need to put distance and altitude between himself and the denizens of the grotto, he sought streets and alleyways that led up.

  The city was diffused with light throughout all its upper levels though, here and there, there were doorways and passages leading down into the darkness under the mountain. There were occasional patches of small wilderness that no doubt had once been parks or private gardens. As he ran through one of these patches of overgrown trees and shrubs, he frightened a covey of quail that thundered into the air around him. Startled, he tripped on an exposed root and fell headlong.

  For several minutes he lay there, gasping for breath and tried to listen for sounds of pursuit over the wild thumping of his heart. His strength was far too debilitated for him to exert such effort. His chest ached and there was a roaring in his head. He shouldn’t just run mindlessly anyway, he knew that. But he also knew that he must take steps to secure his safety.

  After recovering his breath and a measure of his strength, he sat on the grass of the small park, listening for telltale growls and yelps in the city below, and considered his situation logically. He hadn’t explored but a tiny portion of the city, but it appeared to be his alone, for there was no evide
nce of anyone else living in it. By all appearances, it had been abandoned for centuries. Consequently, he now had but three basic concerns: food, water, and defense against wild beasts.

  Water was abundant in the valley and even flowed through the city in several locations. There appeared to be ample sources of food out in the valley. He only needed to provide for defense against wolves. He needed to locate a secure area where he could stay and, if possible, find some sort of weapon.

  He spent the rest of the morning getting his bearings and exploring the city. There were many beautiful apartments with superb views of the valley but none of them were defensible if he were attacked. Every so often, Aram would stand quietly and listen for evidence of the wolves below. He had no way of knowing their habits or how often they frequented the cave beneath the rubble but he believed, based on his one-time experience with their kind, that they would make noise when they discovered his scent.

  He began to search the deeper regions of the city, looking for a place he could turn into a stronghold. A result of this search was that his explorations began to give him a rudimentary idea of the layout of the city. The great frescoed hall into which he’d entered at the first lay at the very heart of the city’s lowest section, bounded on both sides by smaller halls and anterooms. Just to the north of the great hall was an immense square room without windows that appeared as if it could be used for storing food. Aram decided to call it the granary. Beyond the granary, from the next street all the way to the northern edge of the city were large, beautiful halls and courtyards.

  Above that, there was a layer of what had once been magnificent mansions. These buildings, comprised entirely of carved stone, were very beautiful, but there were no furnishings and some had evidently had roofs of wood, which were long gone. Most of the subterranean passages on this level led into what appeared to be small storage rooms for food or other goods. Some of them were obviously sewers and access tubes into deeper regions of the mountain.

  He finally found a broad stairway behind the walls of the great hall that led sharply up and into an alley beyond which was a wide, square courtyard surrounded by tall walls of worked stone. At the far end of the courtyard, another stairway led up to a landing below the sheer face of a wall of rock in the center of which there was a heavy door of solid stone that hung slightly ajar on massive iron hinges. He went up onto the landing and tried the door to see if he could move it. It moved.

  Pushing it open with an effort, Aram entered the room beyond and then heaved on the heavy door until it was nearly closed. He looked around. He found himself in a kind of large anteroom with doors leading off from it on three sides, to the left, right, and rear into other interior rooms. There was no outside access other than the heavy door at the front and two windows high in the wall above it. He nodded to himself, satisfied. Here was the place, then. If he had to defend this door, he felt certain that he could.

  All he needed now was a weapon of some kind. Probably, he would have to go out into one of the overgrown gardens and acquire a long pole, then devise a means of sharpening it to a point, creating a crude sort of spear. First, though, he decided to examine the room he’d chosen as his fortress and the rooms that lay beyond. As he turned to do so, he was stopped by the sight of something that, until this moment, had escaped his notice.

  On the back wall of the anteroom, just above the interior door, there was a faded fresco of a man pulling back on a curving piece of slender wood which he held extended away from him with his left hand. The man’s right hand, positioned on the cheek under his right ear, held the end of a projectile with a pointed end that crossed the curved wood horizontally. The projectile was put under strain by virtue of a cord or wire that was attached to the ends of the curved wood. Aram had seen a bow just once in his life in the possession of an overseer but that weapon had been much smaller than the one depicted in the fresco. This bow was nearly as long as the man who wielded it.

  And there was more. Above the door on the left was another fresco; this one, also badly faded and water stained but still legible, depicted a man with a spear drawn back ready to throw. Across from it, above the door on the opposite wall, there was a man holding a sword at the ready. Beneath each fresco, over each doorway, written in the same flowing symbols used below the frescoes in the great hall, there were words that Aram could not read, but his heart leapt in sudden understanding and excitement.

  He was in what once had been an armory. Perhaps the ancient warriors that had defended this city so long ago had left something behind that could aid him in his current hour of need.

  Trying the interior doors one by one, he was finally was able to move the one on the left. Beyond was a vast rectangular room running deep into the mountain. Along the walls, there were wide stalls that had once been sealed by massive wooden doors. These had rotted completely away, leaving only the great hinges, but there were hundreds of bits and pieces of dangerous-looking metal in the heaps of dust that carpeted the floors of the stalls.

  Upon closer inspection, these turned out to be sharp spear points of various widths and lengths that were still good and sharp and shone when he cleaned them. The wooden shafts, of course, had long since turned to dust. How a man would use and handle a spear was made obvious in the fresco but Aram didn’t need anyone to tell him what could be done with a sharp piece of hard steel. If he could cut and shape a length of wood and figure out a way to attach a spear point, he would have a weapon.

  A row of windows high in the exterior wall gave plenty of light to the room and Aram carefully went through the stalls one by one. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of usable spear points littering the floors. They were all of the same basic shape—a sharp, flattened oblong blade with flared barbs to either side of the conical base—but there were three distinctly different sizes, as if they had once been attached to different lengths of wooden shafts. At the rear of the long room there was another door and after going back out into the anteroom and making the exterior opening secure against wolves, he returned and went through this door.

  The room behind was also quite long, but narrower, windowless and dark, so he pushed the door wide to let in some light. There were hundreds of long metal boxes stacked six and seven high and two deep along the walls. Pulling the lid off one of the boxes, he found more spear points and, surprisingly, bits and pieces of wooden shafts. Evidently, the spears in these boxes had once been stored in a kind of protective oil or wax, but over the centuries this had degenerated into fine, black dust and occasional hard, dried bits like tar, but shiny as flint. Two of the spears at the bottom of the box looked to be in surprisingly good shape, but when Aram tried to lift them out, the wooden shafts crumbled in his fingers.

  Nonetheless, it gave him a measure of hope. There was the possibility that in one of these containers, perhaps in the deepest part of the room, a spear or two had survived. If such were the case, he would be instantly armed. He began methodically on the left-hand wall and went through the stacks of containers one by one. Near the bottom of the first stack he actually found a crate in which the oil or waxy substance still had a bit of integrity, but only in disparate places along the shafts of the row of spears at the bottom and rot had gotten in and destroyed most of the wood. There was enough of a shaft still protruding from the point of one spear, perhaps six or eight inches of reasonably sound wood, that it might be useful in close combat but it would be an unwieldy and cumbersome weapon.

  Doggedly for the next several hours, he went through the crates, and then, finally, fortune smiled on him. Near the end of the wall at the back of the room, in the crate next to the bottom, at the center of the stacked remains of spears, there were six that were still slimy with the waxy oil. Covering them were bits of what must once have been a wrapping of rough cloth. Miraculously, the spear shafts were sound. Joy rose in his heart at the sight and the feel of them. He was armed. He had weapons.

  He spent the afternoon going through more crates, occasionally uncovering more miracle
s and at the end of it all, as the room darkened with the waning of the day, he had a dozen usable spears. Besides that, he had thousands of spear points for which, eventually, he could create his own shafts. He had not only escaped slavery and survived to become a free man but now he also had shelter, food, and weaponry.

  He went back out into the main room and cautiously slid the main door back. Thankfully, there was no sign or sound of the wolves. He sat at the table in the main room of the armory for a while and ate some sweet-root, then addressed the doors he couldn’t open earlier. The door below the fresco of the man with a sword particularly interested him. He knew what a sword was and how it was used. Retrieving the spear with the short shaft from the spear room, he forced the wide sharp blade into the slot between the door and its frame and pried outward. The shaft broke under the strain.

  Using one of the whole spears he tried again. This time the door moved just a little. Gently he inserted the metal point deeper into the gap and carefully exerted pressure until the door swung open. Beyond, in a deep, narrow room similar to the one opposite, were more crates like those in the spear room but smaller, and many were filled with swords, stacked neatly blade to hilt. He gazed upon this treasure with unbounded joy, upon stack after stack of clean, hard, deadly metal, more precious than gold. The swords were made of fine, hardened steel and except for the fact that the leather had rotted off the grips; all were in excellent shape. He found one that suited his hand particularly well and carried it with him.

  There was no such luck in the bow room. Everything in that room had been reduced by the centuries to dust. It was a bitter disappointment. The idea of sending a projectile toward his enemies from a distance appealed to him greatly. He dug through the dross of eons of decay but though he found odd bits of curved wood, there was nothing resembling a bow. There were, however, thousands of metal arrowheads everywhere in the debris. If he could master the engineering of a bow and the making of arrows he would not lack for tips.