In the summer of the year before the year Zero, when the priest had settled into his small stone house and his books had found their places on the rickety shelf that his predecessor had built from logs found fallen in the wood, there came news that a hunting party from the fort had found an altar in the forest. They believed that it was an altar of the Old Believers, the heretical sect that still worshipped in these parts, and of which the priest had heard rumors and given condemnatory sermons.
A circle of eight stones, with a smooth round stone at the center. The trappings of the Old Belief were widely known among the devout, for every mother told her children of the Old Believers and their wickedness, that they preferred unruly children to good ones, and that they would come in the night, or in the day when no one else would see them, to steal them away for sacrifice in the center of their round altar, the Wheel. The priest and the Sheriff traveled into the hills to investigate. One of the hunters led them through the cool forest which made the priest wish that he had brought a heavier robe, to a bright open field atop a low hill. To the north lay the everpresent mountains, and to the south Scoms and the rest of Thane.
Along the edge of the field they found it: a circle of eight stones polished smooth and glassy, and in the center a single round rock with a flat top and jagged lines inset at strange angles. The priest shuddered when he saw it, because it was like a picture straight from the seminary, and he stood by the edge of the Wheel and looked into the forest. The Old Believers worshipped a powerful demon in the earth, the priest knew, which granted them strange powers. He had been told once that they could make themselves invisible and that they could fly like birds. Could they see him now, he wondered. Could they read into his heart? Richard and his men held back from the altar, their attention on all the directions from which ghouls might leap. For their cruelty, the priest saw, they were scared and little men.
The priest stepped across the outer ring of stones and into the Wheel itself. He smiled when Richard called for him to come back, and although he found himself afraid, the fear did not outweigh his curiosity. Here was a genuine altar of the Old Belief. It hardly looked old or long unused, although the grass had grown in around the rocks the way that it does when something sits in one place for long. He knelt and looked at the hub, the flat rock with the jagged lines. A small part of him wanted to touch it, to feel the cool rock with his own finger, but curiosity alone was not enough to make him do that. No. He had seen enough. He stepped back out of the circle with glances over his shoulder, and headed back toward the fearful Sheriff and his men. They hurried him to walk faster, and when the party left the clearing they went briskly back toward the town. They looked fearfully at the shadows in the wood, and the noises of the owls and the birds became weird songs to their ears.
* * *
In the fort of the Lord Istan Famm, past the muddy and manure-filled central yard, a passage through a thick door led to the great room. Here Famm conducted his business and took his meals, and here the priest confirmed the hunters' finding. The Lord Famm watched the priest draw out with his hands in the air a crude diagram of the altar.
"Stupid dogs!" Famm nailed a fist into the arm of his thick and darkly lacquered chair. "I knew they still clung to it. Dreamers all, that's the land-toiler for you. Show them the world, show them the real world, and they will stupidly till their fields and listen to their witches. Damn!"
"I shall issue a report to Riadom, my lord," said the priest. "They shall instruct us as to proper steps. I suppose that they will send investigators to search the village itself. They have men, you know, who can sense the presence of an Old Believer. They are learned in the ways of demonic worshop in places where it persists across the empire."
"Yes yes," Famm said. "I understand that the Church keeps itself apprised of all such things. But we must act today. Tonight. I'll not have the heretics loose. What did they teach you in your schools, priest? Soft ways, eh? The ways of theology and contemplation I'll wager. Well here in the mountain district we must not be soft. Bandits raid from the mountains. We live by the rain and the sun, and when God decides, our crops fail. I protect the land-toiler from all these things. I catch the bandits who rob them and rape their women, and when they starve I open my stores to feed them. They are ingrates who do not care what I do for them. No, oh no. They secretly worship a demon in the earth. They persist in this heresy, and I shall not tolerate it. Nor shall I allow soft-hearted mercy to undermine me. You are new, and you will learn the truth of what I say. I will not appeal to Riadom. I will solve this puzzle with whips and fire."
"Lord Famm, I think I have a suggestion for you," the priest said quietly. "I acknowledge the truth of what you say. I am new and perhaps soft to your ways, but I am learning.
"I hope you might find some use in what they did teach me in the south. Although I am admittedly a man of books, I would suspect that the sort of action you intend to take against the land-toilers would be quite disruptive to the cultivation of the fields, the milking of the cows, and the other tasks of theirs that enrich you and provide you the wealth that you have accrued. Perhaps there is another way for us to accomplish our goal."
Famm nodded slowly. "What do you propose?"
"Demon worship was the quite common in the lifetime of the Hyacinth. The various demonic creatures have common characteristics that may play to our advantage as men of faith and as stern investigators. First of these is sacrifice. Demons demand blood. These Old Believers must soon gather at the altar to make a sacrifice, and your men can catch them there if we are watchful. Then we are obligated to show mercy. We must offer those that we capture a chance to refute the Old Belief and join us. Some will surely refuse. They will cling to their demon. We will burn them on stakes if you like, or we can hang them before the fort. They are damned already."
Strong emotions filled the priest. Anger. Fear.
* * *
When he left the fort of Lord Famm all things were different. The day itself, although still warm and friendly, was now nothing more than the prologue to the purging of the Old Believers. It was the priest's duty to battle the Old Belief; it was his nature to protect the innocent. He made his way down the hill and past the hanging tree, and on the dusty road to the village he looked out across the fields. Green lines of corn slowly surged toward the sun, and the wheat fields fluttered lazily with the softest breeze. Among the crops, which were all the property of Istan Famm, the land-toilers went about their labors. They carried water or hay for the horses, dug ditches where the overseers had determined that ditches were needed, and watched over the sheep and cattle. They were all blind to the future as the priest now knew it would unfold. Lord Famm and his men would come at night, and just ahead, where the first huts of the village began, they would push the land-toilers away from their homes while the searches got underway. They would beat them and pay for betrayals, and although the priest brooked no kindness to heretics himself, and could find in his heart mercy but barely forgiveness, he could not look at the land-toilers the way that he had the day before, or even the hour before. Swords and whips and fire, these would be Famm's tools, and surely Richard would not hesitate to err on the side of killing too many.
It would be his commandment.
Terror would be their weapon, and the priest would stand beside them. He would sanction Famm's death sentences, and urge the accused to confess so that they might die quickly. He hoped he had the fortitude for what might happen to those who refused. Their ends would come slowly and with great pain, he was sure. They would cremate the dead at dawn, in the tradition of the True Belief, when God's light bathed the world in the new day. Is this really what the Hyacinth had wanted?
The priest would be there, but he could not stand the thought. Yes, it was his duty to fight the Old Belief, but he was a man of books and a man of kindness. For him the greatest power of the True Belief was in its infinite mercy and the good people who made their lives in its service. They believe in God's light and they live by the Hyacinth's code. I try to do the same, he thought. This made all the evils of the empire -- and, in truth, no other word could describe them -- bearable. So why would the forest heretics who called themselves Old Believers worship a demon?
* * *
It was a book of the Old Belief, Orlov's Guide for Wary Churchmen, that led the priest to doubt his own judgment. This thin parchment volume, with its stink of age and mold, had lain in the bottom of his chest since before his departure from Riadom. He read it though the day in his shuttered house by the orange glow of a pigfat candle, and it enumerated the sins of the Old Believers: sacrifices in the earth, a demonic presence that craved blood. These things he saw in it with a mixture of revulsion and curiosity. What power was there in the wood that his own faith could not dispel? What force could the Old Belief command that the True Belief, the heart of the church and the center of the priest's whole life, could not? The priest had made up his mind to see for himself.
He made his way up from the village, back along the trails that he had followed only that morning with Richard and the hunter. He left behind him the cooking fires and the naked children, left behind the straw roofs and the pigs, the chickens and the sheep. He climbed the steep trails and found himself descending within sight of the northern mountains, the jagged peaks and the snowy passes, the great impassable wall between Thane and the end of the world, which drew the criminals and deserters, the runaway land-toilers of the Thanian provinces. This was the reason for Famm's harshness. Were he to loosen his grip on his people, and they were by law quite literally his people, that they too might flee for the northern waste.
The priest came upon the open field, and stopped well short. He lurked in the shadows of the forest for a time, and doubts began to consume him. He had lapsed again in judgment, his conscience reminded, in even coming to this place. The True Belief was a wall that could protect him from all things, or from most, and it certainly could protect against the temptation of curiosity, if only he would let it. He wrapped himself tightly in his robe, and stood quite still. Out across the field, the Wheel beckoned. He had stood in it only this morning, and had kept himself from touching the smooth stone. Was that restraint to avoid scaring Richard, or was it to avoid the greater temptation? The Old Belief. His heart beat quickly, and as he recited to himself a thousand false reasons for legitimately coming to this place, he knew that he had never been suited to this frontier post. He was a man of thinking, a man of study, and he reviled his sinful heart.
The priest had loved, and he had seen fornicators run through the streets of Riadom. He had walked in sunny fields, and he had seen failed crops withered and dry. He had dreamed, and he had seen the darkest hours of the night when sleep would not come and guilt poured through him. He was a man, although consecrated to God, and in him all the failings of the flesh lurked. They subverted and tempted, whether in the form of fury at a wrongly hanged man, or lust at the view of a young strong land-toiler woman (that path he always denied himself, always). He tried always to remain loyal and true to the Church and to himself, and to the rightful lords of Thane. But temptation lapped at his feet, a gentle bath of sin, and he was not as strong as he wished he could be.
He stood like a statue, his robe drawn around him to keep out the chill as the sun set. He should not have come here. If they were out there, if the Old Belief truly gave its adherents powers that he had never seen in the Church, if they moved invisibly through the wood, could they see him now? He felt that they might. But he also felt that he would surely sense them, as a man of the Church himself, and he felt nothing. No eyes, no prying consciousness within reach, no lurking spirits. As light and shadow faded into a single grey fabric, as the sun's eyes slipped shut, he stepped out into the clearing with a vow that he would but touch the hubstone, as he had wanted to do earlier. Although this in itself constituted a submission to temptation, his thinking had become distorted and unclear. He sought to justify himself, but he could not. With every step toward the circle of stones, he knew that he was stained.
He stepped within the circle as he might have touched a woman. His heart seemed near to exploding, and he felt fully and dreadfully alive. The stars had begun to appear, and moon with them, and he could see the hubstone before him, set firmly in the grassy ground, its markings invisible in the grey light.
As he knelt slowly and reached out his right hand to touch it, and only to touch it once, a shape appeared before him. It wove itself of the grey moonlight, and stood atop one of the wheelstones that comprised the outer edge of the circle. He felt sweat appear all over his body, and a wave of nervous energy swept through him. It was a figure of a man, or a woman, or the night itself, and as he stared at it, his hand frozen in its reach toward the hubstone, it spoke to him.
"Tare," it said. That was his given name. "I offer you courage."
This was the Old Belief.
Intoxicated and drenched with the sinfulness of the moment, the priest found himself unable to say or do what he had known all his life was right. Beneath his black robes and his woolen cap, beneath all the years of careful learning, and beneath even his thrashed-in fealty to the True Belief in defiance of all else, the priest was less a priest than a man. And here, speaking to him and him alone, was the ancient power of the Old Belief.
"I accept," he said.
They appeared at that instant, woven of the night and seated all around him on the wheelstones. Weird and vaguely discernible faces of men and women, haunting eyes that stared through his priestly adornments and saw into the soul that he had exposed. They had, somehow, been there all along. And now they sang.
The music was not like music at all. There were no words and no melody, no meaning to the ears, but all their voices coalesced into a single sustained tone that penetrated the priest and seemed greater than itself. It hummed, and his bones hummed with it. He was inside it with them, with the spirits of the Old Belief, and it was as if his life had ended and a new one had begun. He could never be the same person again.
The message of the voices was this: "Did you think that they were always your masters?"
Pain shot through his body. At first it appeared as aches in his joints, then enveloped him fully. In his toes and fingers, in his knees and his chest, the pain was extraordinary and violent. He felt as if he were coming apart, as if the music and the singers were killing him for his transgressions, and he almost would have welcomed such an end, having seen them and their power in all its weird truth, and he cried out because he could not control himself. The pain filled his jaw and his teeth, and it burned and ached and stung him, and his cries became hoarse and primitive, and somehow in the cloud of the pain, in the shroud laid over him by the singers and the song, he realized that he was not dying at all.
He was growing. His body convulsed with pain, burst out of his garments and grew. His boots peeled away to free his feet. His tunic burst at the seams, and his woolen cap slid from his massive head. The black robe itself split at the neck and down the back seam. From within, massive new muscles took shape on his growing frame. They were not what they had been before, the muscles of a priest whose work was largely done with a book or quill. These were the muscles of war.
Then visions emerged from the night itself. He saw into the past, onto a field on which two armies stood. It came in flashes and bursts, in sight and in thoughts that he could not have thought himself. It came from them, from the singers, and as the priest cried out with the pain of his transformation, he saw a past that he had never known. One army was that of the Masters. Moving in rapid precision. Golden shields. Long bright swords. And the other was an army of men. Thanians. He knew which one was king and which were the lords. He knew the lords by name: Firo, Harkess, Basala, Exus, Janara, Vorgos. Over their heads fluttered prayer flags, strange banners. This was the past, filled with absurdities. Thanian lords. A free Thanian army standing against the Masters. Raising their swords against an enemy that was innumerable, that commanded the field, that converged on them from all sides when they did not see. He saw the killing frenzy, the confusion on the field. The banners of the noble houses swarmed by the Masters. Pulled down. Engulfed.
At that moment he finally truly saw. This was more than the sight lent by eyes and by light. He saw with his whole mind a presence that existed through himself, through the land, through the trees and the earth. The hum of the singers captured a churning, humming life-force greater than all the prayers and faith and self-abnegation of all his years of schooling, greater and more real than any of the resonant tales of the Hyacinth, greater than anything he might have felt in the brightest and most sanctified dawnlight ceremonies. The presence filled him with what he knew were its own wild emotions: anger, anger, anger. He recognized this for a moment as the sin that it was, but only for an instant, because he forgot himself and his care and his temperance and his mercy and all his meticulous learnings. The pure essence of the anger absorbed him. Its fury became his own. His denial and his faith fell away and in that same instant he welcomed some piece of the thing into him.
The priest saw this, and he saw more.
