The Runes of Norien

As darkness thickened and the cold became insufferable, the girl led them to a grotto at the foot of a neabry hill, where they could pass the night in relative comofrt – to which she saw at once, experienced as she was in living on her own, by lighting a fire with branches and driftwood and roasting the fish and some mussels she’d gathered.

  And then, fed and rested and finally, mercifully dry, they huddled together and formed a chain, so that they could listen to more of the girl’s revelations; this they did by placing Yodren in the middle, with Gallan and Raddia sitting on either side of him and holding his hands, while they in turn held Wixelor’s and Yonfi’s hand respectively. Within moments they were all fluent in the Divine Language.

  The girl began by offering a brief, simple version – the only one she knew, a fact for which she apologized – of her people’s religious beliefs. Unlike the other realms of Norien, the Gods of the Forgotten Sphere were extremely human-like: not only did they possess well-known and frequently depicted forms, but they were men and women, and indulged in all the vagaries and vices of their genders. Most importantly, however, Erat Rin was ruled by three major deities: the God of Life, the God of Death – both men, and great enemies – and their Exalted Mother, the Goddess Luck, without whose consent they were absolutely powerless. That was why, when sacrificing animals to ask a favour of the Gods, Oblivians always cut off the choicest part and burnt it on Her altar.

  Of course, the girl said, all this was passed on from one generation to the next as a sort of tale to teach men, women and children to be more fearful and virtuous, but that no one truly believed that these fantastic entities roamed the world picking fights and luring people into ruin. But when the Stone of Death came hurtling from the heavens, killing hundreds of thousands of people in an instant, those who had survived clung to the ancient religion with fervour, either seeking absolution by starvation – or, if hunger got too painful, by suicide – or imitating the Gods’ worst iniquities, reasoning that, by resembling them in cruelty and foulness, they became godlike themselves. The girl, for instance, had learnt most of the olden myths from a blind old man who lived in a cave and sung of the Gods’ heroic deeds to the awful strum of a broken lyre, and who, though subsisting on what the girl caught or gathered for him, thought that she should be so grateful as to repay his wisdom by offering up herself to his lecherous gropings – a fate she avoided for months by digging holes in pumpkins and placing them between her legs, so that the abominable old man unknowingly copulated with his dinner while she whimpered and moaned to the rhythm of his huffing and puffing.

  “What about No Place?” Yodren asked, for although they could all understand what the girl was saying, he alone could articulate her language.

  No Place, apparently, was part of yet another ancient myth, according to which, between the realms of existence and nonexistence there hovered a world unknown even to the Gods of Life and Death, where the souls of the unborn originated from and where the dead went after they were free from the mortal coil. Since the Oblivians, for all their vivid imagining, didn’t believe in an afterlife of either sumptuous reward or everlasting punishment, they invested No Place with every pleasure, dread, hope and wonderment of life, so that over the centuries and despite its name, it evolved from a vague concept to an actual place, where everything was so different it resembled a dream: something that flees the mind even as it stirs within it the vibrant pangs of fear or desire.

  And, as was to be expected, in the daze that followed the near-total extinction of life on Erat Rin, this mythical nowhere became more popular than ever, encompassing every survivor’s frail hope that somewhere, somehow, a pocket of the world they knew had managed to elude the annihilation of the Stone of Death.

  “You see,” the girl said, her beautiful eyes gleaming in the firelight, “those who had seen and lived to recount the disaster, were of three different minds as to what had actually happened.” There were those who claimed to have seen the Stone remain intact all through its deadly fall, crashing into solid ground and causing massive earthquakes, tidal waves, as well as raising the soot-snowing clouds that still overcasted the sky and kept the world in the grip of an endless grey winter. Others, however, said that, as it tore through the sky, the Stone had split in two, and that the resulting pieces collided in both the earth and the sea, so that entire landmasses had sunk forever into the furious waters. And there was still a third group who believed that the destruction, doubtless the work of the cruel Gods of Life and Death – killing most people while letting some live just to suffer – had been at the last moment influenced by the Goddess Luck, who, livid at the wickedness of her Sons, had torn off a third piece from the fragment that was supposed to ensure the survival of some people, and let it drop, gently as the planting of a seed, in a land which, by grace of Her mercy, was left unscathed. And since it was the warmth of the sun and its life-giving presence that the blighted Oblivians missed and longed for the most, that haven was woven into the myth of No Place, renamed as Land of the Sun and populated by the Sun People, blessed by the Goddess Luck and her bounty.

  Since their minds were as united as the warmth of their breathing, they all heard Wixelor thinking, The stolen Runes! They’re all here! Which made perfect sense: the Rune of Death had done its damage, partly mitigated by the Rune of Life, but what had kept these infinitely powerful objects from neutralizing and destroying one another, what still maintained a certain balance in this shaken, shattered world, must be the Rune of Fate and Chance, sent by Its God to prevent the End of All Things.

  “Where is this sunny place?” Yonfi asked, yawning and shaking himself awake lest he be taken for a sleepy babe. “Because I would really like us to go there!”

  But this was something neither the girl, nor anyone she had ever met seemed to know for sure. Some believed it was just another fable meant to console the miserable people of Erat Rin – the bereaved, the perpetually hungry, the wretched children with their skewed spines and lame feet – with the dream of some far-fetched wonderland.

  What she knew for a fact, since every older person she’d ever met seemed to be in agreement about it, was that they were on an island that once boasted one of the world’s greatest kingdoms, which had perished in a single sweep of the sky-high waves, sparing only those who lived up in the mountains: the shepherds and villagers who, in the bitter aftermath, once plants had been killed by the ashes and the sunlessness, and their flocks had to be butchered and eaten before they died off too, degenerated into monsters.

  However, the girl went on, her voice tinged with hope, those who had been to the island’s south coast after the disaster, looking for more fish or mushrooms or perhaps even some resilient animals that had survived and could be bred or eaten, claimed that sometimes the cold was pierced by a balmy gust of wind, carried across the sea from beyond the horizon – and possibly originating from the longed-for Land of the Sun.

  Which sounded just like the Hidden Nowhere they’d come so far to find.

  The rub was this: no one among them could tell where this southern coast might lie. To Gallan and Raddia, the mere concept of south seemed obscure, for theirs had been a world of boundaries that shouldn’t be crossed; and although Yodren had been taught by his father how to find his bearings in relation to the four points of the horizon, he could only do so by estimations based on the position of Feerien’s moons.

  But as sleep finally claimed their huddled knot, Wixelor was visited by a dream.

  It was the dream of a bird, and like those of all beasts it was at once very simple and extremely lifelike, consisting mostly of visceral, powerful feelings.

  He was a raven, flying above the desolate greyness. He was cold and tired, and wished he could rid his plumage of the peristing stench and moisture of the sea, whose salt now caked his once shiny, beautiful wings. He resented the sea, and deeply, but the only way to stay alive was by stalking its shallows and shoals for fish, while at the same time making sure that the repulsive flocks of gulls
and albatross wouldn’t attack him for poaching their prey. He could always join an unkindness, but he mistrusted his own kind no less; if food was scarce, it wouldn’t be above them to feed on their weakest.

  Oh, how he missed the good old days! Lazing around on the branch of a pine, warmed by shafts of sunlight and nibbling on blackberries or the occasional squirrel! Flying effortlessly for no reason other than the pleasure of it, aloft on wafts of wind as mild and fragrant as a bed of budding hyacinths! And then, well-fed and rested, seeking the company of a luscious female for some idle preening and mating...

  Nowadays his poor, weary body could never get enough satisfaction to make up for the strain it had to suffer every single day. The few dead trees still standing offered no shelter from the bitter, endless wind, and most of their hollows were occupied by big, unfriendly owls. Carcasses, once an abundant source of flesh – the rich flesh of animals so huge their fat could sustain you all through the harshest winter – were now either too hard to come by, or dangerous, for men, most desperate of all beasts, often used them as decoys. Just the other day he’d seen a crow, too young and hungry to be wary, swoop down on the eviscerated corpse of a badger, only to have a band of grimy children who lurked behind a boulder pounce upon it and break its neck to feast on it.

  But now his chilled body and worn-out wings were pleading for some rest, so that the raven had to make up his mind as to where he’d spend the night. Yesterday he’d been lucky, and found a cave that wasn’t crawling with hostile bats, but this could have easily changed; and besides, though he’d been forced to make many compromises in the last few months, some part of him still revolted at the thought of sleeping in a deep dark hole, out of which he couldn’t fly away at once if some unkown danger presented itself. He was going in circles above the bent husk of an olive tree whose gnarly roots formed a cavity and wondering if it would be vacant and spacious enough, when he was suddenly struck by a blast of wind as strong as the beating of huge wings, so that he had to make a dive to keep his balance. But the wind came rushing again, an invisible wall that pushed him back – and this time he realized what was most shocking about it.

  For one thing, it was warm, decidedly warm, shrouding him in a sense of delight he hadn’t felt since that last time he’d basked in the sun; and for another, along it came an unmistakable aroma, zesty and lovely: the smell of a eucalyptus tree.

  The raven had no clue as to the origin of the wind, but even so he let himself be tossed to and fro by its powerful currents and undercurrents, happy as can be – for this was how the old world, the old, wonderful life felt like.

  And plummeting and rising once more, he let out his happiness in a screech.

  Wixelor woke with a start, the raven’s call still ringing in his ears.

  And then, turning around, he saw that it wasn’t all a dream: for through the dim light he saw the actual bird, sharp-beaked and black, sitting at the mouth of the grotto.

  There couldn’t be more definite an omen.

  He awakened the others gently by wrapping his long bony arms around them, and once they began to stir he wordlessly told them of his dream and how, since it had come so startingly true, it could only mean that they should try and follow the raven.

  And despite their sluggishness, they all realized how imperative it was to do as Wixelor suggested, and so they untangled their intertwined limbs and got to their feet as noiselessly as possible, lest they frighten the bird that stared at them with the shiny beads of its eyes. Even Yonfi, whose immediate urge would have been to run at the bird with widespread arms just for the pleasure of terrifying it, understood the importance of keeping quiet all too well: the cold he’d woken to was so piercing that, if there was the slightest chance that the raven should lead them to a place where the wind blew warm and smelled of trees, he was determined to refrain from so much as looking at it.

  But their cautiousness proved unnecessary, for just as they were trying to decide how to best approach the bird without scaring it off, the raven let out a loud squawk and with a single beating of its wings flew at Wixelor and alighted on his shoulder.

  Raddia smiled to herself. “He thinks you’re a tree,” she said.