Ashe nodded, overriding the protest that was bubbling on the duke’s lips. He turned to the Yarimese soldiers gathered under the tent.
“Out, gentlemen. Thank you.” As the Bolg Sergeant came forward and stood before the obelisk, it was as if the rest of the people standing beneath the strung canvas in the town square faded into the gray darkness of oblivion, leaving only himself and Entudenin, alone together in the universe.
Even in its state of decay and petrification, the geyser was, like himself, a child of the Earth, one born of fire, the other of water, both unique creations that had known the magic of the Mother’s touch.
As he walked around it in wonder, the first thing he felt was an overwhelming sense of loss. How beautiful it must have been in its living time, a towering pillar twice as tall as he was, arched at the top in an angle that jutted westward in the direction of the setting sun, beckoning to the wide ocean a thousand miles away. He could almost see how it was formed, and must have once looked, layer upon layer of multicolored rings and stripes in rich hues of vermilion and rose, deep russet, sulfurous yellow and aquamarine, mineral deposits that grew ever taller with the passage of time, until their height surpassed anything on the flat dry prairie of clay for as far as the eye could see.
Now the obelisk stood, lifeless but unbowed, shriveled and covered in a baked red clay, like the rest of Yarim.
Grunthor stepped over the broken stones of the fountainbed at its base and approached it slowly, almost reverently, wondering what could have happened to cause such a vibrant, growing source of life-giving water in the middle of the cold desert to suddenly cease, then fade this way. He put out a hand to touch its shrunken flesh.
Beneath the tips of his fingers, the desiccated clay felt surprisingly warm and supple. Grunthor blinked; his eyes told him that the geyser was dead, its once-moist clay now hard and inflexible, but a deeper part of him, the place where he and the Earth were indissolubly bonded, was taking over his sight, his senses.
From deep within the ground he could hear the voice of the Earth, the slow, melodious song that had first crept into his unconsciousness, permeating ever fiber of his being, when he, Achmed, and Rhapsody were crawling in the depths of the world, pulling themselves along the spidery roots of Sagia, the World Tree, fleeing from their hunters to this new, strange land. The song wound around his heart, whispered invisibly in his ear, and it told him the tale of Entudenin.
The song recounted the birth of the region known as Yarim in the language of men, a place forgotten by the trade winds, in the shadow of the mountain, at the base of the glacier, on the continental divide, where the ground was barren but the earth held riches, deep and hidden. Ore of copper and manganese, iron and rysin, the blue metal so beloved of the Bolg in the making of steel, healing mineral springs, opals and precious salt all were concealed beneath the thick red clay, but with no regular prevailing sea winds, no cool gusts from the mountains, the ground hardened stubbornly, refusing to give up its bounty easily.
Grunthor stood, rapt, transfixed, the tale forming images he could see inside his mind, as the song grew more melodious, more fluid. The tale changed to the story of the Erim Rus, the Blood River, a muddy red watercourse stained by the slough of the manganese-red mountains. The Erim Rus had eventually met up with a tributary of the mighty Tar’afel, and their marriage had formed a beautiful oasis at the riverhead. From that marriage Entudenin had been born.
The Tar’afel, like any great river that bisected a continent, had a network of underground tributaries that scored its riverbed and the floodplain that surrounded it, some reaching for many miles from the actual banks of the river. One of these veins was particularly fortunate in its placement; it connected, in the vast, spidery network of subterranean springs that form a watershed, to a strong line fed directly from the sea, through a volcanic cave in the northern coastline of the icy Hintervold. That cave was pocketed in the rockwall at the exact place where the Northern Sea met the open ocean, producing an immensely strong crosscurrent that backwashed for a thousand miles.
This backwash was the lifeline of Entudenin.
Along the way east the seawater traveled through the glacial fields of the Hintervold, where it was sweetened by icy drainage and deprived of some of its salt; it passed beneath the verdant fields of Canderre, through the peat bogs and rich loam that gave that province its bounty, until it finally reached the sandy, mineral-laden red clay of Yarim, where it decided to stop—that decision forced by the deep, heavy layers of all but impenetrable clay and bedrock that had been left over from the formation of the mountains to the east. Filtered by ice, sand, and time, and ramming up against the underground barrier, the water, now sweet, had nowhere to go but up.
And up it went.
At its birth, Entudenin had been little more than a puddle, emerging with a gurgle, then spreading out with a great muddy burp. Had there been any human eye around to witness its arrival, it might have gone unnoticed entirely, but the region would not be inhabited for several thousand years. It was not a monumental beginning, but it was an important one; the seal of the earth over the water had been broken.
From then on it was merely a matter of the passing of time and the tides of the ocean, dictated by the phases of the moon. When the sea current was at rest, Entudenin rested as well, its water source withering to a trickle that pooled beneath the fields of Canderre, never traveling into the region of red clay at all. But when the tide turned, and the moon was at the height of its strength, the seawater poured in violently, racing along its course until it erupted in a joyful shout from the evolving geyser, spraying glistening drops into the air to mingle with the sunlight. As this continued over the millennia, the minerals that remained around its mouth began to grow thick and harden, forced upward by pressure, until the obelisk that had been Entudenin in its glory had risen, tall beneath the countless stars of the endless desert sky, reaching toward the moon.
That obelisk, formed of sea and earth, well traveled from many places, containing precious minerals and ores, salt, ice, and time, took on a life of sorts, a child of pure Earth, a wonder of the world; sweet water in the middle of a vast, dry land. The glistening mica that scored its walls, glittering back at the stars, was a silent sign of the magic that it held.
And so it had remained for thousands of years more. Eventually this life giving wellspring was discovered by man and put to use, almost worshipped, tended by priestesses of the Shanouin tribe, an extended family of humans who had a Mythlin ancestor. Mythlin were one of the five ancient races, formed at the beginning of time, from the element of Water; thus the Shanouin had talents for divining it even beneath the desert sand. They were talented well-diggers, and it was assumed that they would be the appropriate guardians of Entudenin.
The Shanouin managed the cycle of the Fountain Rock, as Entudenin became known in the language of Yarim. They kept those who longed to harvest the water away for a full day after its cyclical Awakening, when, with a deep rumble and a glad shout, the backwash roared forth with enough force to break a man’s back. The Shanouin maintained control as the water was gathered during the Sennight, or Week, of Plenty, that followed the Awakening, where the flow was abundant; then through the Sennight of Rest, when the copious spray settled into a smooth, bubbling stream. As the current turned fallow in the sea, the water of Entudenin would subside into a quiet trickle, known as the Sennight of Loss. During that week, only those with grave illness in their households or the elderly and frail were allowed to collect from the wellspring. Finally, as the moon went new, Entudenin slipped into the Sennight of Slumber, when it slept, waiting for the moon to shine again and turn the tide.
And so it went on, year after year, to century and millennium, until the day of the Shifting.