Chapter Twenty-Eight Ruhlin
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Ruhlin
“The key is not to speak, but to listen,” Ohtera told him.
“Its voice may be faint at first, but that is only because you haven’t truly learned to hear it.
” They sat close together on his bed, voices pitched low so as not to attract the notice of a passing guard.
“Close your eyes. Look inward, and do not shy away from what you find.”
Doing as she bid, Ruhlin stared into the blankness of his own eyelids for a long, contemplative interval of hearing nothing at all. “You said it was a god,” he said, patience growing thin. “If so, shouldn’t there be some ritual or…”
“Quiet!” she hissed. “Shut your mouth and listen.”
Swallowing further protest, he tried again.
For a time there was just the same void, the silence broken only by his breathing and the soft thump of his heart.
This is pointless, he decided. It responds only to anger…
He heard it then. Very distant, but unmistakably a growl from deep within.
Was it the mere thought of anger that woke it?
he wondered. He entertained the notion of feeding it ugly memories, of which he had many, but held off, recalling Ohtera’s caution against attempting to communicate with the monster.
The god, Ruhlin corrected himself, although he remained unconvinced the beast he harboured could be in any way divine.
The growl came again, different this time. Ruhlin had heard the monster laugh before during its rampages, expressions of delight taken in slaughter. But now he detected a different form of amusement. There was something almost parental to it, an elder taking note of childhood absurdity.
So you are not a god? he asked, forgetting Ohtera’s injunction. Then what are you?
No answer. It was gone.
“You heard something,” Ohtera said when Ruhlin opened his eyes. “I can tell.”
“It was faint. Perhaps my own imaginings.”
“No. I felt it too. It’s how it is with gods. They sense each other.”
“Why are you so convinced of their godhood? They could be anything, all unknowable to us.”
Ohtera lowered her gaze, face growing tense. “I will stand no ridicule,” she said.
“I wasn’t…”
“But you will. If you hear my tale.”
Tentatively, Ruhlin reached for her hand.
It was just a soft pat of reassurance, for he dared do no more.
“I have seen a formless creature of purest spite craft itself a body from tree roots,” he said.
“On the ship that brought me here, I met a maiden who knew the course of future events. The woman I love can shape metal with a mere touch of her hand. And my body is home to a creature that can rip whole companies of warriors to pieces. Trust me when I say that there is little you can tell me that I’ll find cause to disbelieve. ”
He watched Ohtera’s inner debate play out in the shifting tension of her features before her head bobbed in a nod. “Very well then. But know, if you laugh at me, I’ll kill you.”
“A fair bargain.”
Ohtera sat back a little, face lost to the shadows but, as usual, her eyes retained a gleam.
“Although I have never been permitted to step outside these walls,” she said.
“I still know much of the world beyond them. For folk from far away are brought here for the Vortigurn’s amusement.
So I know of your homeland and the realms beyond.
I know of tall mountains, great forests, and broad oceans, and I know of gods.
When I was still little, a man was brought here who was unlike all others.
It wasn’t just that his skin was dark, or that he spoke a tongue none within these walls could understand.
It was his happiness that made him strange, for I never saw him without a smile, and his smile was never brighter than when he looked upon me.
It was to me that he first spoke his name: Aribeh.
I didn’t learn its meaning until later, but it was his people’s word for ‘gift’, and he was well named.
“At first the Ventra tried to make him practise in the circle. He was taller and stronger than most in the Kelvengyr and would have stood up well to the test, but always he refused. They punished him, of course, with the stagna and with beatings when that didn’t work.
But he wouldn’t yield. After a time, they left him alone.
I’m not sure why but always assumed it to be the Vortigurn’s order.
He prefers his amusements meet their end in the wuhltra.
“In those days, I was often set to doing chores for the healer. It was not a pleasant task, for he is not a pleasant man, although was never cruel to me, except in his indifference. And so, when Aribeh lay abed in the healer’s chamber and I tended his wounds with salve, he spoke to me, and I to him.
Over the course of months, I began to understand his words, and he mine, so we conversed in a mixture of both.
He called me ‘Suhl Venteh’ which means Little Cat.
It was from Aribeh that I first learned of mountains, forests and oceans.
He had seen many in his time. His homeland lay on the other side of the broadest ocean, and he promised that one day I would see it.
I laughed at him, for even then I knew there was no leaving this place.
It was one of the few times I saw his smile falter, just a little.
Taking my hand, he swore in the name of his gods that I would tread upon the soil of his homeland.
And that was when I first learned of gods.
“His people had many. So many in fact that even he couldn’t name them all, despite being what he called a ‘Tuhlba’, one tasked with speaking to the gods on behalf of others.
In his realm every river has a god, and so does every stream, well and spring.
There are great gods who command the wind and the rain, and others who make the earth shake.
There are gods of the heart, gods of the mind and gods of fate.
But then, he told me in a whisper, there were other, darker gods who could, and should, never be named.
These, he said, arose not from earth or water.
Nor did they descend from the sky or leap from fire.
These came from a place beyond reach, beyond sight, but still as real as anything your hand could touch or eyes see.
‘You, Little Cat,’ he said, ‘have one such god within you.’
“At first I thought he teased me, and was angry for it. But such was his kindness, I could never be aggrieved at him for long. It was Aribeh who taught me how to listen for the god’s voice.
Before that it was like yours, arriving unbidden in times of fear or anger to wreak havoc until the Ventra used my stagna to subdue it.
It was only when I began to hear its voice that it changed. ”
“Allowing you to summon it at will.”
“It’s not like that. It’s more that it knows when it’s needed. Our will became…” Struggling for the right words, she held up her hands, knitting the fingers together. “We are still separate in many ways, but also joined.”
“So it talks to you?” Ruhlin asked. “What does it say?”
“It speaks not in words, but feelings. But it does not feel as we do. For, as Aribeh told the tale, it is made of different stuff. So, as I listened, I heard its confusion, its fear. But most of all, I heard a terrible loneliness. Also, I sensed its surprise that the vessel containing it was capable of comprehending its presence. I came to understand that, before this, it had thought itself trapped in an animal, a beast incapable of true reason.”
“From where does it arise? How did you come to be cursed with it?”
“Such things cannot be communicated through mere emotion, but, given its confusion, I’m not sure it knows.
But I do know it’s grateful, for in hearing it I banished its loneliness.
It sees what I see, hears what I hear. Sensation is as food to this god, and it always wants more, so much so that Aribeh cautioned against overfeeding it.
‘All gods demand sacrifice, Little Cat,’ he warned me.
‘And sacrifice can take many forms.’ He smiled as he told me this, but wept also.
I didn’t know it then, but this was to be the last time I would ever see him.
” She paused, shifting uncomfortably on the bed.
“And here we come to the part of the story where you shall think me a liar, or mad. But it is truth, that I swear on the god within me.” Ruhlin saw that the gleam in her eyes had deepened and knew it to be the result of welling tears.
She spoke on, voice thickened by remembered sorrow.
“Then he kissed me on the forehead and bade me go to sleep. When I woke, he was gone.”
“He escaped?” Ruhlin asked. “Then it is possible.”
“It must be. But that is not the strange part. For, though his cell was empty, there was no alarm at his absence. No clamour raised, or guards set to frantic searching. Assuming he must have been taken away on the Vortigurn’s orders, I asked the Ventra in charge when he would return.
He said he had no notion of whom I spoke.
At first I thought him a liar, either engaged in some cruel prank or obeying instructions to keep silent about Aribeh’s fate.
But years in this place had taught me well how to read faces, and I saw only honest bafflement on his.
I asked my fellow Kelven and received the same response: ‘Who is Aribeh?’ I came to understand that all memory of his presence had been cleansed from every mind in the Kelvengyr, save mine. ”
She fell silent, eyes narrowing. “I know you ponder the possibility that he never truly existed. That my child’s mind, beset by desperate solitude, created him.
A phantom friend for a lonely girl. But he was real.
As real as you.” She shifted again, the light catching on the curved, metallic object she drew from inside her tunic.
“As real as this,” she said, pushing it into Ruhlin’s hand.