“It won’t be all bad, Melly,” Stephen said, tousling the little girl’s golden curls, smiling at the sparkle that had returned to her black eyes. “There will be more children for you to play with.”
“Hurray!” she shouted, dancing in excitement through the thin snow on the balcony floor.
Stephen nodded to the children’s governess as she appeared at the balcony doors. “Just wait a few more days, Sunbeam. The winter carnival will be set up, with so many brightly colored banners and flags that you will think it is snowing rainbows. Now, run along. Rosella is waiting for you.” He gave Gwydion’s shoulder another squeeze and kissed his daughter as she ran by, then turned once more to contemplate the changing times.
4
Unlike the capitals of Bethany, Bethe Corbair, Navarne, and the other provinces of Roland, the capital city of Yarim had not been built by Cymrians; it was far more ancient than that.
Yarim Paar, the second word meaning camp in the language of the people indigenous to the continent, had been constructed in the midst of the great dustbowl that formed the majority of the province’s central lands, hemmed in between the dry winds of the peaks of the northern Teeth to the east and the ice of the Hintervold to the north. Farther west, nearer to Canderre and Bethany, the lands grew more fertile, but the majority of the province was a dry land of scrub and red clay, baking in the cold sun.
Yarim’s neighbors, the hidden lands east of the Teeth, were fertile and forested; it was as if the mountains had reached into the sky itself and wrung precious rain from the thin clouds hovering around their peaks. The sea winds swept the continent from the west, carrying moisture as well, endowing the coastal realms of Gwynwood and Tyrian and the near inland provinces with robes of deep green forest and field. By the time those winds had made their way east to Yarim, however, there was little relief left to give; the clouds had expended the bulk of the rain on their more favored children. In especially dry years, Yarim grew little more than dust as a crop.
At one time, a tributary of the Tar’afel River had run down from the glaciers of the frozen wasteland of the Hintervold, mixing with what the early dwellers had called the Erim Rus, or Blood River, a muddy red watercourse tainted by the mineral deposits that caked the face of the mountains. It was at the confluence of these two rare waterways that the village of Yarim Paar had had its birth.
For all that the area had seemed a wasteland to the early inhabitants of the continent, nothing could be further from the truth. A king whose name had long been forgotten smugly referred to the lands of Yarim as the chamber pot of the iceworld and the eastern mountains. There was some unintentional wisdom in those words.
Its spot on the continental divide had left Yarim rich in mineral deposits and, more important, salt beds. Beneath its unassuming exterior skin ran wide veins of manganese and iron ore against the eastern faces of the mountains, with a great underground sea of brine farther west. Finally, as if these earthly treasures were not enough for the area to be seen as richly blessed, the windy steppes were pocketed with vast opal deposits containing stones of myriad colors, like frozen rainbows extracted from the earth. One of the opal mining camps, Zbekaglou, bore the name, in the indigenous language, Rainbow’s End, or where the skycolors touch the earth.
So Yarim’s eastern mountains gave the province great hoards of manganese and copper, iron ore and rysin, a blueish metal valued highly by the Nain; its wide western fields provided the greatly prized commodity of salt, which was pumped from the earth through shallow wells that vented into the underground ocean of brine and potash, then was spread out in wide stone beds to allow the sun to evaporate the water, leaving the precious preservative behind; its central-eastern steppes produced gems of priceless value.
Yarim Paar, by contrast, was endowed with no mineral deposits to speak of, no brine sea, no fertile farmlands. It was a barren waste of dry red clay. But it was the poor south-central area of Yarim Paar which made all of the province’s wealth possible, because Yarim Paar had received one gift from the Creator that none of the other areas of the province had been given—the gift of water.
Even more than the riverhead of the Erim Rus and the Tar’afel tributary that joined it, themselves great watery riches in an arid, thirsty land, Yarim I aar was also the site of Entudenin, a marvel whose name was commonly translated later as the Wellspring. It was more often known as the Fountain Rock or simply the Wonder—the Yarimese had few examples of Nature’s artistry to marvel at, and so expended many names on the one they did have-but a more exact meaning of the word in the ancient language would have been the Artery.
In the time when it was named, Entudenin had been a towering geyser spraying forth from an obelisk of minerals deposited over the centuries in ever taller layers. At its pinnacle the obelisk was twice the height of a man, or perhaps even twice Grunthor, and as broad as a two-team oxcart at the base, tapering up to a narrower, angled shaft.
Even without its miraculous gift of water in near-desert, Entudenin would have been a wonder to behold. The dissolved solid minerals in the runoff that had formed the obelisk were myriad, and had stained the enormous formation with a variety of rich colors, hues of vermilion and rose, deep russet and aqua, sulfurous yellow and a wide stripe of rich earth-brown that teased the sandy red clay on which the huge waterspout stood. The mineral formation glistened in the light of the sun, gleaming with an effect similar to the glaze on sugared marzipan.
Unlike the hot springs rumored to have been the center of the mythic city of Kurimah Milani, an ancient center of culture said to have been built at the desert’s edge that one day vanished into the sand without a trace, the water that shot forth from the mouth of Entudenin was cool and clear, though heavy in mineral sediment. The legend of Kurimah Milani told of how the hot springs there had endowed those fortunate enough to have bathed in them or drunk from them with special powers of healing and other magics, derived, no doubt, from the rich mineral slough contained within them. The inhabitants of Yarim Paar did not covet those healing springs—the cool, life-giving water welling forth from Entudenin was magic enough for them.
The discovery of the marvelous geyser in the middle of nowhere prompted the building of an outpost near it that later became a camp, then a village, then a town, and finally a city. With the ready availability of water came construction for function and expansion for form. Great hanging gardens were built, elegant fountains and outdoor statuary museums with quiet reflecting pools as well, transforming the ramshackle little camp into a glorious example of lush desert architecture. Within a few centuries Entudenin was supplying not only the vast amounts of water necessary to maintain this sparkling jewel of a capital city, but all the water to the outlying cities, villages, outposts, and mining camps as well.
In its living time the Fountain Rock was roughly attuned to the cycles of the moon. At the onset of the cycle a great blast of ferocious furor would rage forth from the Wellspring, spraying sparkling water skyward, showering the thirsty ground. The sound that accompanied the event welled from a deep roar to a glad shout as the torrent surged from the darkness of the Earth’s depths into the air and light.
For a full week of the cycle, the water flowed copiously. On the first day of the blast, known as the Awakening, the townspeople would gather to thank the All-God in ritual prayer but refrained from actually drinking or collecting the Wellspring’s liquid bounty. Part of this was a sacrificial abstinence in thanks to the Creator, but part of it was the rule of common sense as well; initially, the force of the water rushing forth from Entudenin was similar to a raging rapid, more than sufficient to break a man’s back.