Once upon a time, so long ago nobody can
count the years, no High King sat guard at the Way’s Opening, which the People
call Shirith. Back then the land was a lot like it is now, a broad waste of
smoke and ash, with air that would poison anyone who stayed too long. At the
center stood ridges of mountains, tall and black, and the heart was the tallest
of all, the High Fire Mountain herself. Fimberevell, they called her, and she
spat molten rock and fumed out dark clouds that kept sunlight from touching the
Mother’s face. Only a desperate man could look at that land and think it was a
good place to settle. Only Bearach of the Nenastan could think it was better than
what he had.
What he had was nothing but mouths. He and all the Nenastan
had got their land pulled out from beneath their feet just that spring, and
they’d grown hungry and tired of wandering place to place, finding tribes
everywhere they went. They’d had to fight to fill their stomachs, and run from
fights with nothing to show for their dead, and by the time they got to the
edge of Fimberevell’s land there was nowhere left to go, nowhere at all. They
pressed on and on, but even without crossing the mountains into the dark land,
people started dropping in their tracks from the volcanic stink, dead as if
they’d been stabbed through the heart, dead, dead.
Finally Bearach said he would go in, and see if there
wasn’t a solution somewhere to their problems. "Maybe," he said, "there’s a
spirit of some kind I can appease, or maybe there’s something the mountains
want that I can give."
“And what if it’s your life?" asked Fialt, the tribe’s
priest. "What then? Don’t go." But Bearach shook his head. He’d go no matter
what anybody said, and he did. Early one morning, when overnight they’d lost
three children to the volcano’s gases, he got up before everyone but the
grieving parents and tied a wet rag over his mouth. He took two skins of their
precious water and set off into the waste.
Bearach didn’t get far before he was filthy and gasping,
but he didn’t stop. He didn’t stop when his lungs burned and his legs buckled
beneath him. He drank water and went on under skies black with Fimberevell’s
rage, under lightning-clouds flickering and flashing, under rains that made his
skin itch and sizzle. The closer he got to the High Fire Mountain, the more
difficult his passage was, until he was crawling, dying, dying.
“Help me," he gasped, thin, with the last of his breath. "If
you’re there, help me. I want to help you." Then he lay still. He couldn’t move
anymore; he couldn’t catch his wind, no matter how he tried. He shut his eyes
with an airless sigh of pain. He would give anything to save his people, but
he’d given everything and come up empty-handed.
As he lay there suffocating he thought he heard a little
child calling to him, "Bearach… Bearach…"
When he opened his eyes he saw a girl all made of glowing
stone, and her long loose hair streaming smoke. "You’re killing me," he said,
in his mind, wishing he could speak out loud.
The girl reached down and touched his forehead. Fire seemed
to break over him there, and he screamed.
“Why did you come here, Bearach?" she said. "You know I can
kill you without even trying."
He found he could breathe, and spoke. "There might’ve been
a chance. You never know."
But the girl shook her head. "There wasn’t."
“Isn’t that what life’s about?" he asked her. "The
might-have-beens. The almost-theres. That’s what makes a life; what it isn’t as
much as what it is. People will talk of me and say that I tried, and that’s
enough for my story."
“She looked away from him, out toward where the sea boiled
from her anger. "And what,” she said, "what if there was a chance?"
“Then," said Bearach, "I would do anything. I would even
bind my fate to yours, and the fate of my children, and my people. Let’s make a
bargain," he said, inspired. "I’ll be your hand, and my children after me. And
you’ll be my hand, and the hand of my children, for ever and always. You’ll
never be forsaken."
The girl didn’t say anything, but she reached down and took
Bearach’s hand in both of hers. He shouted again, with agony and joy both
ringing in his voice, and knew nothing.
The next time he opened his eyes, it was to a gull’s cry.
The bird winged free through the clear blue heavens, and he understood. The
Mother’s face trembled beneath his steps as he walked down the mountainside and
up the next, and he waved the stump of his right arm to his people, and shouted
down to them; and that’s the story of the first High King.
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