He saw, by the glitter of starlight coming through rifts in the clouds, other figures moving also toward the jungle depths. But he did not acknowledge them, nor they him. The Velalisier obeisance was performed alone: a private ritual for a public grief. One never spoke of it; one simply did it, on the fifth day of the fifth week of the fifth month, and when one’s children were of age one instructed them in the manner of doing it, but always with shame, always with sorrow. That was the Way.
He walked into the forest for the prescribed three hundred strides. That brought him to a grove of slender towering gibaroons; but he could not pray properly here, because aerial clumps of gleam-bells dangled from every crotch and pucker of their trunks, casting a sharp orange glow. Not far away he spied a majestic old dwikka tree, standing by itself, that had been gouged by lightning some ages ago: a great cavernous charred scar, covered along its edges by regrown red bark, offered itself to him as a temple. The light of the gleam-bells would not penetrate there.
Standing naked in the shelter of the dwikka’s huge scar, he performed first the Five Changes.
His bones and muscles flowed, his skin cells modified themselves, and he became the Red Woman; and after her, the Blind Giant; and then the Flayed Man; and in the fourth of the Changes he took on the form of the Final King; and then, drawing breath deeply and calling upon all his power, he became the Prince To Come. For Faraataa, the Fifth Change was the deepest struggle: it required him to alter not only the outer lineaments of his body but the contours of the soul itself, from which he had to purge all hatred, all hunger for vengeance, all lust for destruction. The Prince To Come had transcended those things. Faraataa had no hope of achieving that. He knew that in his soul there dwelled nothing but hatred, hunger for vengeance, lust for destruction; to become the Prince To Come, he must empty himself to a husk, and that he could not do. But there were ways of approaching the desired state. He dreamed of a time when all that he had been working for was accomplished: the enemy destroyed, the forsaken lands reclaimed, the rites reestablished, the world born anew. He journeyed forth into that era and let its joy possess him. He forced from his soul all recollection of defeat, exile, loss. He saw the tabernacles of the dead city come alive. In the grip of such a vision, what need for vengeance? What enemy was there to hate and destroy? A strange and wondrous peace spread through his spirit. The day of rebirth had arrived; all was well in the world; his pain was gone forever, and he was at rest.
In that moment he took on the form of the Prince To Come.
Maintaining that form with a discipline that grew less effortful by the moment, he knelt and arranged the stones and feathers to make the altar. He captured two lizards and a night-crawling bruul and used them for the offering. He passed the Three Waters, spittle, urine, and tears. He gathered pebbles and laid them out in the shape of the Velalisier rampart. He uttered the Four Sorrows and the Five Griefs. He knelt and ate earth. A vision of the lost city entered his mind: the blue stone rampart, the dwelling of the king, the Place of Unchangingness, the Tables of the Gods, the six high temples, the seventh that was defiled, the Shrine of the Downfall, the Road of the Departure. Still maintaining, with an effort, the form of the Prince To Come, he told himself the tale of the downfall of Velalisier, experiencing that dark tragedy while feeling the grace and aura of the Prince upon him, so that he could comprehend the loss of the great capital not with pain but with actual love, seeing it as a necessary stage in the journey of his people, unavoidable, inevitable. When he knew he had come to accept the truth of that he allowed himself to shift form, reverting to the shapes of the Final King, the Flayed Man, the Blind Giant, the Red Woman, and then at last to that of Faraataa of Avendroyne.
It was done.
He lay sprawled face down on the soft mossy soil as the first rains of morning began to fall.
After a time he rose, gathered the stones and feathers of the little altar, and walked back toward the cottage. The peace of the Prince To Come still lay upon his soul, but he strived now to put that benign aura from him: the time had come to commence the work of the day. Such things as hatred, destruction, and vengeance might be alien to the spirit of the Prince To Come, but they were necessary tools in the task of bringing the kingdom of the Prince into being.
He waited outside the cottage until enough of the others had returned from their own obeisances to allow him to enter upon the calling of the water-kings. One by one, they took up their positions about him, Aarisiim with his hand to Faraataa’s right shoulder, Benuuiab to the left, Siimii touching his forehead, Miisiim his loins, and the rest arranged in concentric circles about those four, linked arm to arm.
“Now,” Faraataa said. And their minds joined and thrust outward.
—Brother in the sea!
The effort was so great that Faraataa felt his shape flowing and shifting of its own accord, like that of a child just learning how to bring the power into play. He sprouted feathers, talons, six terrible beaks; he became a bilantoon, a sigimoin, a snorting raging bidlak. Those about him gripped him all the more tightly, although the intensity of his signal held such force that some of them too fluttered as he did from form to form.
—Brother! Hear me! Help me!
And from the vastness of the depths came the image of huge dark wings slowly opening and closing over titanic bodies. And then a voice like a hundred bells tolling at once:
—I hear, little land-brother.
It was the water-king Maazmoorn who spoke. Faraataa knew them all by the music of their minds: Maazmoorn the bells, Girouz the singing thunder, Sheitoon the slow sad drums. There were dozens of the great kings, and the voice of each was unmistakable.
—Carry me, O King Maazmoorn!
—Come upon me, O land-brother.
Faraataa felt the pull, and yielded himself to it, and was lifted upward and out, leaving his body behind. In an instant he was at the sea, an instant more and he entered it; and then he and Maazmoorn were one. Ecstasy overwhelmed him: that joining, that communion, was so potent that it could easily be an end in itself, a delight that fulfilled all yearnings, if he would allow it. But he never would allow it.
The seat of the water-king’s towering intelligence was itself like an ocean—limitless, all-enfolding, infinitely deep. Faraataa, sinking down and down and down, lost himself in it. But never did he lose awareness of his task. Through the strength of the water-king he would achieve what he never could have done unaided. Gathering himself, he brought his powerful mind to its finest focus and from his place at the core of that warm cradling vastness he sent forth the messages he had come here to transmit:
—Saarekkin?
—I am here.
—What is the report?
—The lusavender is altogether destroyed throughout the eastern Rift. We have established the fungus beyond hope of eradication, and it is spreading on its own.
—What action is the government taking?
—The burning of infected crops. It will be futile.
—Victory is ours, Saarekkin!
—Victory is ours, Faraataa!
—Tii-haanimak?
—I hear you, Faraataa.
—What news?
—The poison traveled upon the rain, and the niyk-trees are destroyed in all Dulorn. It leaches now through the soil, and will ruin the glein and the stajja. We are preparing the next attack. Victory is ours, Faraataa!