Samples from books that we have published at Eartherean Books.
This is another in a series from the fourth book in the 4-book series The Doom-Quest of Ara-Karn: Darkbridge.
© 2009 by A. Adam Corby
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
The Lady of the Sword
IT HAD BEGUN LIFE as a fortress. Elna himself ordered the building of its gates. It had grown into a town, a city, and then a city-state rich with prosperous merchants who traded with the barbarians of the far North, and for cheap trinkets took possession of priceless raw goods and bandar-skins to sell at staggering profit to the civilized cities. And then it had fallen beneath a shadow, the shadow of Ara-Karn.
Now the haunted ruins of Gerso in the Pass of Gerso had become a memorial and a shrine to his dark worship.
None lived there now. But from a score of cities in the North, and from every village and tribe in the far North, streamed men and women to look with awe upon the Conqueror’s first footprint on the world.
Many came, and not all with pretty things to mutter about the Conqueror, to the Gray Oak.
The Gray Oak stood in a small hollow just outside the broken remnants of the gates. The tree rose majestic and fearless in the winds of the pass. It was dead and no leaves sprang from its branches, but when the storms of winter howled down through the pass, and broke trees just as great, no branch cracked or fell from the Gray Oak. No snow gathered on its branches or the sere dead circle of brown grass that surrounded it; no drop of rain could touch it. And it was said that the light of Goddess never fell upon that place.
Deep paths were worn down the valleys of the pass and up from the city ruins, to the circle about the Gray Oak. Many worshipers gathered there at all seasons of the year. They came to look upon the tree and what the tree embraced within its breast. The worshipers left offerings of flowers, green boughs, twigs of evergreen. They brought their infants there, and blessed them in its presence.
There were no paths worn within the dead circle. Every blade of withered grass stood as it had on that fateful pass when the city fell, and the Conquerer here had wrought one of his signal triumphs. It was whispered that a curse lay upon the spot, and no living thing might endure to enter there.
Mostly it was women who came. They were worshipers of Goddess from the barbarians and the civilized cities both. They came to offer what they could, to the body caught in the Gray Oak’s embrace.
One winter, a woman came up out of the North, and followed the pilgrims’ road through the blackened walls of Gerso. She wore rags and a dark green hooded hunting-cloak from Gerso, fastened with a blood-red opal brooch-pin cut in the likeness of a serpent’s egg. The woman wore the hood over her head, masking her features.
There was something about the woman that made the other pilgrims keep apart from her.
She walked beneath the mountain-high pillars that had once held the gates of legend. She made her way to the Gray Oak as though reluctant to go there, unwilling, but drawn against her own desire.
She walked about the circle three times. The hooded head did not rise, the woman in rags did not look up the tower of the tree. But its presence seemed to weigh down upon her shoulders.
She stopped when she reached for the third time the hollow spot heaped with treasures and green offerings to the Gray Priestess.
The woman knelt among the offerings, and faced the bole of the Gray Oak where Ara-Karn had worked his will, and there impaled the Gray Priestess, the Guardian of Gerso, upon the tree with the sword of Tont-Ornoth.
For a long time the woman knelt there. She spoke no word and made no gesture. The other pilgrims grew nervous at her silent presence. They moved aside and made their offerings at the cross-quarters of the circle instead. When the hour of the longsleep came, they seemed glad to go among the tents clustered under the feet of the mountains.
The woman in rags stood. She faced the tree. She stepped forward.
Her foot, booted in animal skins and bound with leather straps, was the first to touch the grass since the Conqueror’s.
She walked forward. Almost it seemed she walked like one in sleep or some trance, or like a priestess fulfilling an ancient ceremony.
She reached the base of the great tree.
Before her the bark and bole of the tree had embraced the frail, thin body, so that the form of the Gray Priestess sank half within the wood. The body had not decayed in the years since Gerso fell. The flesh was as supple as though life still coursed through it and the heart still beat. There was not even a stain of blood upon the gray linen of her robes, there where the hilt of Tont-Ornoth stood out of the chest.
The woman in rags stretched forth her hand, and touched the age-old hilt.
It shifted, and drew out of the body and the hard wood easily in her hand.
The Guardian of Gerso opened her eyes.
For a moment she looked, she the dead one, out of deeply tormented eyes, upon the woman who had come to draw the sword out of the tree. A slight breath, or wheeze, or it might have been a word, issued from the thin lips; but if it was a word, none heard it but the woman in rags.
Then the body of the Gray Priestess crumbled into dust, which sank into the ground.
Some few pilgrims had come forth from their tents. Some call or dream had troubled their sleep and drew them out. They stood at a distance from the dead circle; with awestruck eyes they beheld what the woman did.
She turned, holding the sword out away from her. She saw the others and stopped. She put up the sword within the folds of the hunting-cloak, and fled up the pilgrim’s path, up the valleys of the Pass of Gerso, into the wild lands of the far North.
Behind her the others gathered about the circle. They murmured in awe. Even those who had wakened in time to see with their own eyes how the woman had drawn the sword and given peace to the dead, even these found it hard to believe. Had it been a dream? they wondered. And yet there was the proof before them.
Snow began to fall. It drifted gently down from Heaven. And this snow touched the branches of the Gray Oak, and gathered in soft mounds on the dead grass between its roots.
And when dark God rose again as a thin cruel sickle from the bright horizon, the final magic appeared in the mingling of jade and golden light. For Goddess shone upon the tree, and the stalks that struggled up through the snow about the ancient oak were green. And green buds appeared on the tips of branches long thought dead.
