“I have not heard this tale before,” Aliver said.
The other cocked his head to the side, straightened it. “None of us choose our fathers. Neither you nor I, nor anybody else. But, believe me, when one is born to a calling, it should not be refused. To not do the thing one was born to do is a heavy burden to bear.”
Aliver’s legs were stiff the next morning, but they loosened readily enough when put to work. The pace of the second day matched the first. The land through which they traveled shared the same tree-dotted and wide-valleyed rolling contours. But on the third day a pack of four laryx caught their scent and fell in behind them in pursuit. The loping beasts yelped their garbled speech and grew near enough that, glancing back, Aliver could see their individual features. One of them was missing an ear. Another ran on a weakened foreleg. The leader was a larger beast than the one he had killed, and the fourth tended to flank out toward one side, as if already anticipating rounding on them. If the four of them caught up with and surrounded the men, there would be no hope of their escaping alive. Laryx’s hatred of humans went hand in hand with their fear. Like a lion hunting the cubs of lesser cats, they seemed to hunt men out of spite.
Running before them, Aliver realized how different he was now from when he had hunted one of these beasts just a few weeks before. Back then, he had faced with clarity the reality that if he failed in any action, he would die horribly as a consequence. The strange thing was that at his core this feeling was entirely familiar to him. At some level he had lived with such a fear since the evening his father was stabbed in the chest. There had always been an unseen monster pursuing him. Facing a real one, in the bright light of day, liberated something in him. He had run the beast into the ground and then turned on it and drawn close enough that he could smell the creature’s breath. He had looked at the foul entirety of it and…he had done what he was supposed to do. He sank his spear deep into its chest and held it in place as the laryx bucked and protested with the last of its strength. He was not sure exactly how, but he knew this deed had altered something within him for the better.
Kelis pressed the pace. They did not stop at midday. Instead, they ran on through the rippling heat. Though laryx had the capacity to run for hours they only did so when truly provoked. They lost the laryx pack when easier prey-warthogs-came to the beasts’ attention. The two men ran on with little rest and did not pause until several hours after dark.
On the fifth day they traversed a salt flat and came across a mass migration of pink birds. Thousands and thousands of them marched across the land, an enormous flock shimmering in the sun’s glare, each of them long necked and graceful, with black legs that stepped high and formal. Why they did not fly, Aliver could not guess. They just parted as the two runners passed through them, watching them sidelong and without comment.
Late the sixth morning they came to the great river that drained the western hills of water. It was a wide, shallow trench more than a mile across. In the rainy season it was a formidable barrier. Even now it served as the southern boundary of inhabited Talay. The river itself was but a trickle now, a narrow vein of moisture a few strides wide, ankle deep. The two men stood in the water. Aliver enjoyed the feel of the smooth stones beneath his feet, slick against his skin. Had the horizon around them not been an endless stretch of pale, coarse soil, sparsely vegetated and crisped by the long tenure of the sun, Aliver might have closed his eyes and let the feel of the stones and the water conjure memories of times and places very far from here.
“Brother,” Kelis said, “I go no farther than this.”
Aliver turned toward him and watched him as he scooped another gourd of water and lifted it to his lips. “What?”
“My people do not venture south of this river. The Giver will run with you from here. He is a better companion than I.”
Aliver stared at him.
“I’ll wait for you,” Kelis said. “Believe me, Aliver, when you return to this point I will be here to meet you.”
Aliver was stunned enough by this that he did not dispute it. Kelis left him with the list of things to do and not do, reminders of how to conserve water and where to search for roots that held moisture and which animals might likewise offer him a drink of blood. Aliver already knew everything the man recited, but he stood as if listening, lingering in each moment that delayed his departure.
“Sangae gave me a message for you,” Kelis said, as he lifted Aliver’s sack and helped him string it over his back. “He said you are a son to him. And you are a son to Leodan Akaran. And you are a prince to the world. He said he knows you will meet the challenges facing you with bravery. He said that when you lift the crown of Acacia to your head he hopes you will allow him to be among the first to bow before you.”
“Sangae does not need to bow before me.”
“Perhaps you don’t need him to bow before you. But he might-for himself. Respect flows two ways and can mean as much to the giver as to the one receiving. Go now. You have far to travel before the sun sets. You should find hills to shelter in at night, rock outcroppings. The laryx fear such places at night.”
“How do I find the Santoth? Nobody has told me.”
Kelis smiled. “Nobody could tell, Aliver. Nobody knows.”
His first few days alone Aliver experienced even longer periods of trance than previously. It was not so much thoughts of his mission or memories from the past that stirred him as it was glimpses of the chaotic grandeur trapped in the silent flesh of the world, in the air breathing and creatures moving across the land. Once, in a landscape pocked with massive craters, Aliver watched the sky as contained in the bowl through which he progressed. Above him clouds gathered, seethed. They did not move on as clouds usually did. They seemed trapped in this particular spot in the world, ever changing but never escaping.
Moments like this one struck him with import. He did not regard it as a sign to read for prophecy. The meaning was simply there in the viewing, in his watching moments of life with eyes so very opened, so appreciative. In his youth he had never been one to study sunsets or vistas, or to pay much attention to the changing colors of leaves on the Mainland. In this regard he was a very different person from the one he had been.
In the middle of his fourth night alone Aliver awoke, having realized something while asleep that drove him up into consciousness. When Kelis told the story of that dreamer denied his path by his father…he had been talking about himself. Kelis was the dreamer denied his destiny. Perhaps this should have been obvious from his tone, but Kelis had never revealed things about himself before. He had never asked for another person’s pity. He had not been doing so by telling that story either, Aliver knew. Why hadn’t Aliver realized this at the time and said something?
Later that night he had a dream of his own, and he spent the entirety of the next day recalling the actual conversations that had sparked it. During the week or so that he had met each afternoon with Thaddeus, they had talked of more than just Aliver’s challenges. The old man had unburdened himself of his deceit. He explained the tale Hanish Mein had detailed for him of how Aliver’s grandfather might have killed Thaddeus’s wife and child. Yes, he said, despite the source that brought him the news, he did believe that Gridulan had had his family murdered. Because of it, Thaddeus had wanted revenge. He had, for a brief moment, betrayed the Akarans.
Aliver had barely been able to respond, either with renewed anger or with the forgiveness the man obviously craved. He was not sure if he should hate the man for conspiring with Hanish Mein or if he should apologize for his own treacherous family or if he should thank Thaddeus for being the instrument of his and his siblings’ rescue.