Wherein a promise is kept (Ch. 24)

 “A line of sulfur three nails thick,

For binding charms shall do the trick.

What more can one ask of a humble prophetess?

Messenger from the divine, guide to the blind,

I do what you wish! I am at your command!

So don’t be shocked when it’s solutions I find”

Excerpt from Gubita’s poems of aid, the litany of days to come, second standard edition.

“Smallness in the spring – The illusive shine known to the north, silken draping that I have heard is purple and green, known to them as the moon’s laughter. Monster of the morning – This cannot be but the fading of the stars, the goddess’s jewels, the pearls of the sky, the souls of Pontiacs past. As is written in the deathbed clarities: ‘it is a monstrous thing to deny another one of the joys of life, but it is a monster alone that would deny another the clarity of truth, the greatness of all that is, the infinite span of the sky’. Now, clarity shining upon us as to the meaning, how shall we interpret this line? I hope to be forgiven for saying I cannot see the metaphor. Once more, our attention is drawn to the face value of the claim: the smallness in the spring cannot devour a monster of the morning; the draping cannot last past sunrise. This is a fascinating claim, and though I’ve never had the occasion to observe its veracity I am sure of its truth. Here again we see the layers in Ayela’s speech; first, the poetic reference to the natural phenomenon. Understanding this, we can turn a layer deeper to the metaphor within the natural allusion. The smallness, the moon’s laughter, cannot devour the sunrise; in other words, the north cannot shape events of the plains, cannot blunt or pierce the great movements of history, which are as mighty and inevitable as the sunrise”

Excerpt from his second commentaries on the litany, Eato the half heretic.

Wicker was not an overly emotional person. Jen, Yead, Hailey, and Ruthela had all thought so. As these had been the authorities in Wicker’s life, it seemed only natural to her that they had the right of the matter.

“And which one of these four sent you down here?” Vague had asked on that first night she and Gracchus had surrendered themselves to the innkeeper. The pair had been on the verge of collapse and hadn’t the daintiest clue as to the subject of Vague’s strange pronouncement. Two more days of rapid assimilation to a new routine left the unimaginative and uninquisitive Gracchus little room to wonder. But wonder isn’t a matter of leisure, it’s a matter of will. And Wicker was blessed with an abundance of will.

So she wondered. The first day she’d wondered at the economics of the town that she could not bear to call a town for it was of so small a size. How could such a place allow itself an inn, a hexmistress, a holy woman, a dozen shepherds, three butchers, and four master shapers? Following Vague from building to building, the pieces fell into place; the empty docks were exceptional, all the more so for the time of year. The town was of course not self-sufficient. Even in the most downtrodden of times, there is no place truly alone. Realization shone upon her; most places exist for their own sake, giving and taking from the world in so far as such external lifeblood is needed. Should their neighbors disappear, a recalculation will ensue; new partners in commerce will be found, tariffs and taxes adjusted, wealth, aggregate and individual, adjusts to the new reality. And even should there be some profit for each individual to leave the community, somehow few will, or perhaps new individuals shall fill their place, a flow of humanity flowing down the hill of incentive as surely as the storm follows the pressure front. And the wharf was of course no such place! It existed purely for the benefit of those other places; the point, and the faithful the world over. Such a place needed no hope of eternal self-reliance, for they stood firmly in the path of the avalanche of incentive.

And now that avalanche had come; there were no pilgrims. There were no dignitaries from the point to explain the exceptional circumstances. What was there but to assume that services were no longer needed? Come next year, dogs and horses and cattle and those other beasts the Pontiac approved of would be but memories, as forgotten as the people who had, in the grand scheme of things, staked such temporary claim on the windswept crags.

“Which four? The four skies? The four rhymes in a chorus?” Wicker had asked as she’d worked. It had been some hours, but Wicker was unsurprised to hear Vague reply with assured confidence to the seeming non-sequitur. “The Eagle, the Griffin, the Titan, and the Key. So, which of the four was it?”

And suddenly, she was back out of her depth. What was Vague talking about? Choosing four nouns and ascribing agency to them is no way to hold a conversation. Discomfort was Wicker’s bosom friend, though perhaps she’d rather have gone without it.

Did Vague have all day to waste? That was how it had seemed to Wicker, for the business of instruction upon the upkeep of hexes remained paused for what seemed an eternity. As at all such impasses, it was a madman who broke the silence. Specifically, the one who’d raved at Gracchus upon his arrival. Perhaps it was simply that his rambling shook Vague out of her reverie, or perhaps it was something into which Wicker might read entirely too much, for upon hearing him approach, Vague’s tone turned educationally formal, and speech returned.

“There are four main factions at the point. I think they’ve always existed, in one form or another, but certainty is only possible in the here and now. To a lesser extent, there is some certainty in my memories of the point. Much further back than that, and explicit description of church politics are hard to come by”

For lack of a better term, one might’ve called Wicker a fan of Eato the half heretic. Having read what felt like a great deal both by and about him, Wicker found that explicit description of church politics was the driving theme. In this area, if no other, Wicker’s knowledge surpassed Vague’s. But Wicker said exactly what came to mind, which was nothing; Vague continued.

“Think of the simplest shape – the triangle. Upon each of the corners sits a champion of one of three ideas. Each side, then, is an axis, from one extreme to another. What precisely are the questions to shape these axes is irrelevant. All you must understand is that upon one of the corners sits the Griffin, upon another sits the Key, and upon the third sits the Eagle. Over time, scholars, holy men and women, rangers, preachers, and others have fallen in nearer or further to these three. By necessity, closeness to one was distance from the others. At best, one could be cordial with two and cold to one”

Vague seemed to realize she wasn’t explaining much of anything. With a sigh, she tried again.

“What role is the Pontiac to play? How much is she to know before she prophecies? What role are the scholars to play? The preachers? Who controls who, who tells what to the faithful? What are the faithful to believe, other than the word of the holy women whom they come to hear? These are the questions, and the answers define them: the Griffin, the Key, and the Eagle. The fourth is defined by another question: ‘What is it all for?’. It is a dangerous question, and so if you are here by the Titan you are a dangerous girl. So, which of the four?”

Wicker was not convinced anything had actually been explained, but she nodded along. Seeing as she was getting nowhere, Vague turned back to instructing Wicker upon the working of the hexes of the wharf. To all’s delight, Wicker’s deficiencies lay elsewhere, and she took to the work like a physicist to small angle approximations. Unemotionally, though.

And so it had gone, a week of competence, of success small in scale but great in importance, if only to Wicker. And the best part had been that the problems seemed endless: mold eating through a wooden floor was work fit for five minutes, easily halted and reversed with circles of sulfur and a whisper to the wind. Tracing the wetness that had allowed the mold to fester though, that took Wicker from the metal pipes running water from the sea to the desalination nets that water passed through to the pumps, regularly compressing and decompressing in just the right harmony so as to draw fluid from where it was to where it was needed. At each of these steps there were charms and hexes; to dispose of the salt, to fix the proportions of gas in the pump’s reservoirs, to modulate the flow of water in accordance to the switches in the rooms and at the main control in the kitchen. Tracking the workings of each of these hexes and finding the one that caused the leak could take as long as Wicker wished, for knowledge is fractal, and Vague’s insight seemed infinitely deep. Somehow though, it always seemed that the interrogation leaned into avenues Wicker had not intended to probe – history of the point, the role of the rangers, the aviary, the holy girls. Each time, Wicker determined she’d find out something useful like the reason granite was the base for all agricultural leylines. And each time, she’d walk away from the conversation having been thoroughly educated on the selection of the Pontiac or some other such fascinatingly useless knowledge.

A week. That was all she’d had, and now it all seemed moments from ending. Soon, the prophecy would be upon them, and everything would be for nought. Why she thought this, she struggled to articulate. But in her heart she knew that things could not last. Vague would stand witness to one last prophecy, and then she, and Wavel, and everyone else who remained, would leave. And whether Wicker and Gracchus could or would go with them, these days surely could never return.

Someone made their way down the mountain, and Gracchus knew of it. The moment he’d stepped into the chill air of the inn he’d known of it. As dim as the sun may have seemed in the twilight and the heavy cloudage, its heat at least went undampened by the great spire of the point. Gracchus, uninterested in the mechanism, basked in the results of what was surely Wicker’s very hard work keeping the cooling system functional.

“Distracted already?” Wavel asked, trailing Gracchus by not five Dungree wingbeats. That was a strange way of measuring distance, wasn’t it? Wicker supposed calling it eight paces would make things clearer. “Distracted? You’ve never known distraction!” Gracchus called, glancing from Wavel to the tapestry, hanging in all its idiosyncrasy on the western northwestern wall of the mess hall. It was also the northwestern wall of the town assembly, the Shepherd’s conclave, the Captain’s councils, and whatever else people had called the large enough room without substitute upon which Vague ruled with less than an iron fist. Again, Wicker found herself losing the thread – the tapestry hung on the wall, and that was that, and whatever other function the room may have served in the past, it did so no longer; now it was Gracchus’ study.

Licking his lips and biting at fuzz just begging to sprout over them, Gracchus placed thumb and pinky on two blue lines towards the bottom of the tapestry. That this was the bottom of the tapestry and not its top could not be in doubt, though Gracchus did not recall ever informing Vague or Wicker upon the correct orientation of the thing. Briefly, he imagined the insights possible should the tapestry itself be arrayed to serve some function. Then the thought vanished, as so many others did when he contemplated the tapestry.

Vague glided from a shadow Wicker hadn’t thought to exist and sidled up to Wavel “The boy is pale. I’ve seldom seen a boy so pale” “You’ve seldom seen a boy” Wavel replied, something of old melancholy in his voice, something Wicker failed to notice, and upon which she could’ve cast not a shred of influence or comfort had she been capable of it. She’d have felt more horribly left out had the subject of the conversation not been Gracchus, her area of expertise.

“He’ll only stay that pale for a moment, and it’s only because he’s looking for something. Just a touch of the tapestry and he’ll have some insight, some knowledge. But he needs to focus, or it’ll be quite useless” Wicker pronounced with more confidence than she thought she deserved. She’d have felt self-conscious, but it struck her that Gracchus, white as the foam of sea and the droppings of birds, muttering under his breath and stroking fabric in near reverence, was a much more natural magnet for embarrassment.

Whether or not it was reverence, Gracchus himself could not tell. He fixed the question in his mind: “Why are there no pilgrims?” and saw its shape. Lines and shapes and patterns and swirls, something behind them. But only something, not anything. Not an answer, not a cause. The question was ill formed, and its answer bordered on the broken shapes at the edges of the tapestry anyways. It was an interesting thought; that he should know the shapes to be broken, when before they had always looped back in on themselves in perfect concert. Why should that be the case? This question, at least, he could answer without the tapestry: it dealt with the future, and tapestry knew nothing of that. It ought to have been a blow, for he had always prided himself on knowing the future. From the days of predicting the weather on his father’s farm, always he’d known the future, or believed himself to. And now, in a second of clarity, it seemed to him that the truth was just the opposite: that his affinity was for the past, and any predictions he’d made were nothing more than pattern matching.

But pattern-matching doesn't equal comprehension, and the question required comprehension, and the question was more important than any lingering insecurities of his. Intuiting that the question was wrong, he turned to another: “Where did Dolstoy go? What was his mission?”. This was a strange question, and stranger still that he thought to ask it at this time and not earlier. And again, it touched on the future. But the very asking of it was telling; for Dolstoy had come from outside, and that had been in late spring. Two months had not passed since that day.

Had Dolstoy been the last person to reach the point? Had he somehow shut the gates on the coming pilgrims? There was nothing to back up this theory but the vague distrust that all holy men felt for the somewhat base rangers; ties of commerce, ties of diplomacy, the skills of survival, the ways of politics, and the ways of war. Alone though he may have been, but he was well aware of the opinions each class held of the other. How he had come by this knowledge embarrassed him to remember, and so he chose not to, which was probably for the best, as it’d have led him right away from the important questions he now pondered.

Those questions did not include Wicker, Vague, or Wavel, all of whom had turned their attention to more valuable matters than the future of the Pontiac. Matters like dinner, feeding the birds, and scraping crusted muck from the drains.

“What is the role of the rangers?” was the question Dolstoy had intended to ask. Had he asked it, it’d have been the purest of Boltzmann brilliance, a stab in the dark to skewer the mote in god’s eye. It is just for this brilliance that he dismissed the question – for it would not have answered what he was after. And so, he asked sagely, but not wisely: “What role are the rangers supposed to play?”

Had he considered it, he’d have realized a question of this sort barely required the tapestry at all. But when all you have is a doorway to ultimate truth, everything looks like an ephemeral mystery.

And so he reasoned and realized: the rangers had been an army. Covert, disorganized, and an army, nonetheless. The first Pontiacs had known little support, and those few women who spontaneously spoke the words of things to come had been treated as eccentric at best and mad at worst. The scholars and holy men who’d gathered to the Pontiac were less than useless in finding and protecting the holy women. By coincidence to border on miracle, some men of martial skill and knowledge had joined the pathetic ragtag band. They had taken it upon themselves not just to memorize the prophecies, but to ensure that all could hear them. And so, in what might have been a schism in other young religions on the verge of extinction, they traveled. They tracked tales of women struck by bouts of hysteria, of mania, of possession by spirits and echoes of the dead.

There was much, much more to learn; how the role of the rangers evolved – their place in negotiating the opening of the first city. Their battles and charges at the forefront of empire. How they guarded holy women in distant lands, back in the days where it seemed that the world was endless and ever expanding, that the holy words would stretch so far beneath the sky that it’d have no chance to break its ancient agreement.

But Gracchus had time for none of this, and for good reason. For knowledge is fractal, and for every answer there is a story, and in every story a thousand details, each with their own story, each one centuries of history.

This time, though, the obvious question “What do the rangers do now?” would’ve led right to the answer. But how was he to know? Certainly, no one else did.