‘True,’ admitted the abbot, ‘and yet a greater understanding that there are shades of grey would prevent many wars beginning.’
‘But not all,’ said Skilgannon, his smile fading. ‘We are what we are, Elder Brother. Man is a hunter, a killer. We build great cities, and yet we live just like the wolf. The strongest of us dominate the weakest. We might call our leaders kings or generals, but the effect is the same. We create the wolf pack, and the very nature of that pack is to hunt and to kill. War, therefore, becomes inevitable.’
Cethelin sighed. ‘The analogy is a sad one, Lantern — though it is true.
Why then did you decide to remove yourself from the pack?’
‘My reasons were selfish, Elder Brother.’
‘Not entirely, my boy. I pray that time will prove that to you.’
At fifteen Rabalyn didn’t care about wars and battles to the east, nor about who was right and who was wrong regarding the causes. These were enormous issues that concerned him not at all. Rabalyn’s thoughts were far more focused. The town of Skepthia was all he had ever known, and he thought he had learned the rules of behaviour necessary to survive in such a place. True, he often broke those rules, stealing occasional apples from Carin’s shop, or sneaking onto the estates of the absent lord to poach pheasants or hunt rabbits. If approached later and questioned he would also lie shamelessly, even though Brother Labberan taught that lies were a sin against Heaven. Broadly, however, Rabalyn had believed he understood how his small society operated. Yet in the last week he had witnessed appalling scenes that made no sense to him.
Adults had gathered in mobs, screeching and calling for blood. People who had worked and lived in the town were suddenly called traitors, dragged from their homes and beaten. The soldiers of the Watch stood by, doing nothing. Yet these same soldiers berated him for killing pheasants.
Now they ignored the killing of people.
Brother Labberan was probably right to have called him an idiot.
‘Stupid boy, are you incapable of learning?’ It had always seemed such fun to irritate Brother Labberan. He would never raise a hand — not even to lightly slap a child. It did not feel like fun now in his memory.
Rabalyn rubbed at his swollen eye. It was still painful, but at least now he could see again, although bright sunshine still made the eye water.
Todhe had caught him with a wicked blow just as he was pulling Bron away from the unconscious priest. With fury born of pain Rabalyn had pushed Bron to the ground, then swung and hammered a punch into Todhe’s face. The blow had been a good one, and had smashed the other boy’s lips against his teeth. Even so the powerful Todhe would have beaten him senseless had the dog not rushed in and bitten his calf. Rabalyn smiled at the memory. Todhe had screamed in pain. Kalia had called the dog back and Todhe had limped away with his friends. He had turned at the alleyway arch and screamed a threat back at Rabalyn: ‘I’ll get you for this — and I’ll see the dog is killed too.’
He and Kalia and several others had pulled Brother Labberan into the small schoolroom and locked the door. The old priest was in an awful state. Kalia had begun to cry, and this perturbed the three-legged hound, which started to howl.
‘What do we do when they come back?’ asked Arren, a chubby boy from the northern quarter. Rabalyn saw the fear in his eyes.
‘You ought to get home,’ he said.
Arren fidgeted and looked uncomfortable. ‘We can’t leave Brother Labberan,’ he said.
‘I’ll go to the castle,’ said Rabalyn. ‘The priests will come for him.’
‘I can’t fight Todhe,’ said Arren. ‘If he comes back he’ll be very angry.’
‘He won’t come back,’ said Rabalyn, trying to sound decisive. ‘Keep the door locked behind me. I’ll be back as soon as I can.’
‘Did he mean what he said, do you think?’ asked Kalia. ‘About killing Jesper?’
‘No,’ lied Rabalyn. ‘Wait for me. And find some blankets to cover old Labbers. He’s shivering.’
With that Rabalyn set off through the town, heading out towards the old bridge and the long climb to the monastery. He heard the mob off to the west, and saw the flames starting. Then he ran like the wind.
He had been taken to the abbot, told him about old Labbers. The abbot ordered food brought for him and instructed him to wait. The hours wore on. A monk gave him a cold poultice to hold over his eye, and then at last a tall, frightening priest had come and sat beside him. Black-haired and hard-eyed, the man had introduced himself as Brother Lantern. He had questioned Rabalyn about the attack, then he and another monk had walked with Rabalyn back to the schoolroom, skirting the rioting mob.
That had been two days ago, and no-one had heard since whether old Labbers was alive or dead. Todhe and his friends had twice tried to ambush Rabalyn, but he had been too swift for them, darting away into alleyways and scaling walls.
Now he sat high on the northern hillside, near the old ruins of the watchtower. Kalia’s crippled dog was squatting beside him. Todhe’s father, the councilman Raseev, had put out an order for the hound to be killed. Kalia had brought Jesper to Rabalyn. The girl was distraught and Rabalyn had reluctantly agreed to hide the hound and brought him up to the watchtower. He didn’t know what to do next. A three-legged dog was not easy to hide.
Rabalyn stroked the hound’s large head, scratching behind its spiked ears. It pushed in towards him, licking his face, and laying the stump of its amputated right foreleg on Rabalyn’s lap. ‘You should have bitten him harder,’ said Rabalyn. ‘It was just a nip. Should have taken his leg off.’
From his high vantage point Rabalyn saw a group of youngsters emerging from the houses far below. One of them pointed up towards him.
Rabalyn swore, then swiftly tethered a lead round Jesper’s neck and led the hound off down the far slope.
If he skirted the town, and waded across the river at its narrowest point, he could reach the monastery by dusk. They’d protect Jesper, he thought.
Abbot Cethelin sat in his study, and in the lantern light pored over the ancient map. It was of thin hide, two feet square, the symbols and lines of mountains and rivers carefully etched in the leather and then filled with gold leaf. As with many pieces from the pre-Ventrian era, what it lacked in accuracy it more than made up for in beauty. As he stared at the map he found himself wishing he had been blessed with the gift of spiritual flight, like his old friend Vintar. Then he could have floated free of the monastery and up into the night sky, to stare down over lands he could now only imagine through the delicate tracing of gold upon leather.
But that was not his gift. Cethelin’s talent was to dream visions, and to sometimes see within them faint threads — like the gold on the map. He could sense the malignant and the benevolent, constantly vying for supremacy. The large affairs of men, with their wars and their horror, were identical to the battles that raged in the valleys of each human soul.
All men had a capacity for kindness and cruelty, love and hate, beauty and horror.
There were some mystics who maintained Man was little more than a puppet, his strings being tugged and manipulated by gods and demons.
There were others who talked of fate and destiny, where every action of men was somehow pre-ordained and written. Cethelin struggled to disbelieve both these philosophies of despair. It was not easy.
In some ways he wished he could embrace the simplistic. Evil deeds could then be laid at the door of evil men. Unfortunately his intellect would not allow him to believe it. In his long life he had seen that, far too often, evil deeds were committed by men who deemed themselves good; indeed were good by the mores of their cultures. The Emperor Gorben had built Greater Ventria in order to bring peace and stability to a region cursed by incessant wars. To do this he had invaded all the surrounding lands, razing cities and destroying armies, plundering farms and treasuries. In the end he had his empire, and it was at peace. He also had an enormous standing army that needed to be paid. In order to pay it he had to expand the empire, and had invaded the lands of the Drenai. Here his dreams had been crushed by the defeat at Skein Pass. Now everything he had built was falling apart, and the region was descending once more into endless little wars.