Armageddon - the final battle. Its shadow lay with a weight that could be felt on all living humans, even those who had never heard of the word or the concept. Now it was obvious to Hal that each of them, alone, could feel its approach, just as birds and animals under a blue and cloudless sky could yet feel the coming of a thunderstorm. Not only with the thinking top of their minds, but all through their beings, they could sense the buildup of vast forces about to break into conflict above their heads.
And it was a conflict the roots of which stretched back into prehistoric times. Now that Hal had opened his own eyes to its existence, it became obvious how in the last few hundred years the developing historical situation had merely briefly held back the inevitable, coming hour of conflict, while at the same time setting the stage for its final fury.
All of this was there in the poem he had just made, in allegorical form. Now that he looked for it there, he saw each large division of the race represented. The hunters could only be the Others, involved solely with their personal concerns for the brief, secular moments of their individual lives. The deer were the great mass of people like Sost and Hilary, being driven now by pressures they did not understand at last across a dividing line from safety into the hands of the hunters. Finally, there were those who stood back and saw this situation for what it was, with a vantage point like that of a reader of the poem or a viewer of the picture described. Those who could see what was about to happen and who had already dedicated themselves to prevent its happening. People like Walter, Malachi and Obadiah, like Tam, Rukh and Child-of-God. Like -
Without warning, the lighting of the cell and the small section of corridor he could see dimmed almost to total darkness. A shiver ran for some seconds through all around him. At the same time, from nowhere in particular came a deep, rumbling sound that mounted in volume briefly, then died away - as if just beyond the walls enclosing him there had been the passage of that massive, swift-moving avalanche he had imagined as an image for Armageddon.
It was an inexplicable sound to reach his ears, here in the bowels of a Militia Headquarters as this must be, in the center of a city such as Ahruma. Then the lights came back on full, again.
He waited for an explanation to offer itself - for the sound of running feet approaching or the corridor-blurred echoes of raised voices. But nothing sounded. No one came.
Chapter Thirty-five
Gradually, he ceased to wait. The hope that someone might come or some sort of explanation appear left him; and his mind, like a compass needle, swung back to the magnetic element of his earlier thoughts. He had been listing in his mind those he had known who were committed to fight the bringers of Armageddon and he had been about to add one more name - his own.
Because he now realized that he also was committed. But there was a difference between him and the others he had thought of. Unlike them, he had been enlisted at some point farther back than his conscious memory could reach. Even before he had been found in the spacecraft, plans must have been laid to make him part of a war that he did not then even know existed.
Once more, he came back to the fact that there were things beyond the membrane, in the shadowy warehouse of his unconscious, that belonged to a past beyond the life his present consciousness knew. He could feel back there answers that had been blocked from him, as the image of the vault door had blocked his earlier searching. But it was no dead end he followed now. A certainty lived in him that the reason he had been committed to this struggle had been with him all this time in his unconscious.
The same tools that had brought him answers so far should continue to work for him now. He closed his eyes and his mind once more to the cell about him and reached out for the materials of another poem that would give him further answers.
But no poem came. Instead, came something so powerful that he lived it beyond the definition of the words dream or vision. It was a memory of a sound once heard. It spoke in his mind with such keen clarity that there was no difference between that and his hearing it with his physical ears, here in the cell, all over again. It was the sound of bagpipe music. And he found himself weeping.
It was not for the music alone he wept, but for what it had meant, for the pain and the grief of that meaning. He followed sound and pain together as if they were a braided thread of gold and scarlet leading him first into darkness and then out once more into a cloud-thick, chilly autumn day, with tall people standing around a newly-dug grave, below willows already stripped of their leaves, and the high, cold peaks of mountains.
The people about seemed so tall, he realized, because he, who was there with them, was still only a child. They were his people and the grave had been filled in though the coffin it held was empty - but the music was now filling it, for the body that should have been there. The man playing the pipes and standing across from him, up near the head of the grave, was his uncle. His father and mother stood behind the gravestone, and his great-uncle stood opposite his uncle. His only other uncle, the twin of the one playing the pipes, was not there. He had been unable to return, even for this. Of the rest of the family present, there was only his one brother, who was six years older than himself, sixteen now and due to leave home himself in two years.
At the foot of the grave were a handful of neighbors and friends. Like the family, they wore black, except for five of them with oriental faces, whose white mourning robes stood out starkly amongst the dark clothing around them.
Then the music ended and his father took a limping half-step forward, so that he could close one big hand over the curved top of the gravestone, and speak the words that were always spoken by the head of the family at the burial of one of its members.
"He is home." His father's voice was hoarse. "Sleep with those who loved you - James, my brother."
His father turned away. The burial was over. Family, neighbors and friends went back to the big house. But he, himself, lagged behind and drifted aside, unnoticed, to slip away into the stable.
There, in the familiar dimness warmed by the heavy bodies of the horses, he went slowly down the center aisle between the stalls. The horses put their soft noses over the doors that locked them in and blew at him as he passed, but he ignored them. At the barn's far end he sank down into a sitting position on a bale of new hay from the summer just past, feeling the round logs of the wall hard against his back. He sat, looking at nothing, thinking of James whom he would never see again.
After a while a coldness began to grow in him; but it came, not from the chill of the day outside but from inside him. It spread from a point deep within, outward through his body and limbs. He sat, remembering what he had listened to the day before, with all of the family gathered in the living room to hear from the man who had been his dead uncle's commanding officer, to tell them how James had died.
There had come a point in the talking when the officer, a tall, lean man of his father's age, named Brodsky, had paused in what he was saying and glanced over at him.
"Maybe the boy… ?" Brodsky said. Small among all the rest, he had tensed.
"No," answered his father harshly, "he'll need to know how such things happen soon enough. Let him stay."
He had relaxed. He would have fought, even in the face of his father's command, being sent away from what the officer had to tell.
Brodsky nodded, and went on with what he had been telling them.
"There were two things that caused it," he said slowly, "neither of which should have happened. One of them was that the Director of the Board at Donneswort had been secretly planning to pay us with the help of some pretty heavy funding promised from William of Ceta."