Often their little ship plowed over a sunken tree, and Aaath Ulber would hear it scraping the hull—or he’d hit a submerged body and feel it bumping along.
Aaath Ulber held his tongue, not wanting his children to know what made that noise.
So the ship sailed at quarter-mast, moving sluggishly, so that Myrrima and Sage could direct Aaath Ulber around the larger logs.
It would take months for the old river channel to get clear of debris, Aaath Ulber suspected. The Hacker River was just a trickle at this time of year. The water would move the logs and sticks around, send them surging inland when the tide rose, suck the debris back out to sea as the tides fell. The winds would have their way with it, too, blowing it toward one shore or another, depending upon the day.
In time it would wash high up on the beach, or it would sink into the depths, or it would simply wash back out to sea.
But for now the refuse was everywhere. In some places where the channel turned, the winds had already sent it into still eddies, and there the flotsam was so thick that it looked as if one could hike across it.
Already it had begun to smell foul as dead animals oozed into the flow. Aaath Ulber could hardly bear to look at it, for fear of whom he might see.
“Can I come to the Earth King’s tree?” Sage asked her mother.
“If your father will take you,” Myrrima answered.
Aaath Ulber raised a questioning brow. He’d thought that Myrrima would go to the tree.
“I think it best if you aren’t seen in town,” Myrrima reasoned.
Aaath Ulber couldn’t argue against that, nor did he want to. He’d need Draken, Rain, and Myrrima to go through town and purchase what ever supplies they could lay their hands upon, and they would need to reach good bargains, for his money would not spread far.
With this in mind, he promised to take Sage with him. She smiled at the thought, and began to chatter incessantly about her theory: the Earth King was going to rise again!
Aaath Ulber didn’t believe such foolishness. He wasn’t even sure that the young oak tree there at Fossil was the remains of the Earth King. It made sense, in a strange way. When a flameweaver was killed, the elemental in it took the form of towering flames and did its best to consume all that it could. When a wind wizard died, it released a tornado. When a water wizard passed, she typically gave herself to the sea. So it made sense that Gaborn would find some way to quickly return to the earth.
But Aaath Ulber refused to put too much stock in such speculation.
So they sailed in the late evening toward Fossil, and finally came to a place where the flotsam was so thick, Aaath Ulber did not dare go farther.
He moored the boat to a tree, and the family walked. A mile upstream, the vast tidal wave had deposited a huge wall of tangled trees and wreckage. Some of the local children from Fossil were out exploring in the mess.
Town was a mile beyond. By the time they reached it, the sun had nearly fallen.
Aaath Ulber gave Myrrima his coin pouch, such as it was. He wasn’t sure what a merchant might make of the steel discs from Caer Luciare. Myrrima had her own coin pouch as well, but it had been a lean year, and the family had been counting on the harvest to pay for supplies for next.
“First things first,” Aaath Ulber warned as he pressed his coin bag into her hand, “Hooks, needles, twine, matches, a good ax—”
“I know,” Myrrima said. Aaath Ulber bent down and gave her a kiss on the head, a clumsy gesture. It felt like kissing a child.
Fossil was not a large village, just a couple of hundred cottages all huddled on the banks of the river. It had a single inn and a great house that was used for the village moots.
Myrrima, Draken, and Rain took the old River Road to town; Aaath Ulber and Sage crept through some orchards, thus skirting the village altogether.
A couple of dogs barked at Aaath Ulber, and a horse nickered, as if it was time for feed, but otherwise the village paid him no regard.
Aaath Ulber and Sage reached a crossroad, heading north and south.
Night was beginning to fall. The air had gone still in the hills, which were thick with boulders. Among the short dry rangit grass, crickets had begun to sing. It was but two more miles.
With the coming of night he made a run for the tree, while Sage raced at his side. Running felt good. Once he got a steady pace, he reveled in the race, and became lost in thought. Sweat streamed down his face and back, while his heart hammered a steady rhythm. He cleared his mind and focused only on breathing.
Birds peeped querulously from the gorse along the road as he ran, while ferrin and rangits darted from his path.
Half an hour later, the evening sun was falling behind the hills, a rose colored pearl that limned the horizon. The old dirt highway ran right up to the side of Bald Hill, and Aaath Ulber could see the tree on its crown a mile away.
“There’s your tree, Sage,” he huffed. “It hasn’t turned into a man.”
“There’s someone beneath the tree, though,” Sage pointed out.
Her eyes were sharper than his. He saw nothing, until after a few minutes he spotted movement, a lone figure in the dusk. But then it seemed that the figure vanished again, perhaps by walking to the far side of the tree.
He put on a burst of speed, went climbing to the top. The hill was covered with dry grasses. Cicadas buzzed in the dusk.
He crested the top of the hill, came to the tree, and halted. The setting sun smote his eyes, backlighting the tree in shades of rose and blood.
No one was standing beneath it. Aaath Ulber peered around its base, just to be certain.
Sage gazed up at the oak silently, as if communing, and Aaath Ulber stood for a long moment, letting the sounds of nature wash through him. The tree’s leaves shivered in a small wind, and elsewhere in the vales below he could hear the breeze rustling through dry grasses.
He noted motes of dust caught in the wan light, small green motes that seemed to be dripping from the leaves. The ground beneath the tree seemed unnaturally bright, and as if golden sunlight caught it, sunlight that wasn’t there.
Aaath Ulber felt a thrill as a voice suddenly filled the silence within him, a voice that he recognized from long ago.
“A great evil is rising in the west,” the Earth King Gaborn Val Orden whispered. “I’ve sensed the change coming all summer. The crickets heralded it in their songs, and the mice worried over it. The enemy will commit a sacrilege against the earth.”
“Master,” Borenson said, dropping to one knee and lowering his head in token of respect. He had visited this tree before, a few years back. He’d sat beneath it on an afternoon and longed to hear Gaborn’s voice. But he’d left feeling empty and unsatisfied.
Now there was no denying what he heard. Gaborn’s voice came soft but clear. Aaath Ulber peered into the tree itself, and saw a ghostly form. Gaborn’s arms were raised up, contorted into limbs, and his elongated hands were lost in the branches. His face had the greenish hue of an Earth Warden, but his eyes had changed most of all. They seemed to be filled with starlight and kindness.
“A war is beginning, a war not for this world alone, but a war that shall span all of the heavens. Your enemy will embark upon a terrifying course, one that you cannot yet see. Their armies will race through the heavens like autumn lightning.
“Only you can stop them, my old friend. There is little that I can do to help.”
“Command me,” Aaath Ulber said, “and I will do all that is in my power.”
“I once told you how some had murdered my chosen. Do you recall?”
Aaath Ulber bowed his head, wondering why that knowledge would be important. He remembered the day clearly when Gaborn had visited him, revealing how some monstrously evil people had carried out plans to murder those under his protection. It was a secret that Aaath Ulber had never revealed. “I remember.”