Vandar Harkess, the last son and heir to the House of Harkess, walked out from the Monastery along the crumbling rock trail that led to the northern hills of the island. He wore a light cloak of frayed sheepskin, and carried with him a sack of food and, hanging from his belt, a simple short sword that he had received from his father upon his engagement to the girl Anjelica, from the village of the herders and farmers. It was not affixed with jewels, as the ancient lords might have preferred their weapons, because those things did not exist on the island. It was plain and decorated only with the eight-pointed Wheel of the Thanian religion as it was practiced on the island: the Old Belief. The eight stations of the Wheel represented the stations on the journeys of life, and the central hub represented faith itself. He wore the Wheel also on a silver medallion, a gift from his father.
Vandar had broken faith. He would be gone within a day.
The wind whipped at him from the sea, which crashed on the rocks at the bottom of the cliff on which the Monastery stood, and his hair blew about with each gust. His face was thin and hawklike, his eyes round and blue. His cheekbones made jagged angles just below his eyes, and his whole face seemed to narrow down to his thin mouth and his sharp, jutting chin. His eyes were his mother's, and his face and wiry frame his father's. He was not a large man, but he was young and strong, and he took each step of the path, when it angled sharply up along the grassy bluff, at a swift and agile pace.
The whole island seemed to confine him. He looked back at the Monastery, with its white stone roofs and grand stained glass window (again in the form of the Wheel), and the outbuildings that lined the interior of the low stone perimeter wall. This crumbling structure embodied all that Vandar hated about the island, about his family and father, and the curse that robbed the Harkess name of vitality and glory. They had survived the conquest of the Devils, perhaps, but they had lost their courage. Now they were slowly dying.
The Island of the Monastery lay just beyond the northern edge of the world. It lay in a cold sea in the shadow of the world's great cliffs, which rose up to staggering heights and blocked out the sun and sky during the worst months of winter. At the top of the cliffs, which the islanders had long ceased to imagine or contemplate, lay the world itself: warm and idealized in fireside stories, longed-for by the romantic and glory-seeking, and forever beyond their reach. Their island lay at the foot of those cliffs, beneath the grey clouds that collected mid-way up the rocky face. It was forever cold and windy and wet, forever cut off from the world itself, and forever alone in the long night of Thane's enslavement.
The people of the island had no idea what had happened in Thane since their own ancestors fled the place centuries before. They knew the stories of the Devil armies, the witness at Coormo, the betrayal of their lands by the traitors in Riadom and Visselno, and the long flight of the Harkesses across Thane. They knew the name Mericet Harkess, who inherited the mantle of the house of Harkess after his father's death in battle, and who led the family and its servants through the forests and hills of the frontier, into the Mountains at the End of the World, and down through a secret tunnel that led into the dark earth. At the end of it they found the sea, a hidden crevasse with boats for the taking, and the island itself.
For three hundred years they had lingered here, and not once had an islander set foot on the land back across the strait. The world is cursed, Mericet Harkess had said when claiming the island for his family, and we shall no more return to it than we will sell out ourselves to the monsters who now rule it. He decreed that death should be the punishment for any who dared return to the world before the Wood's command, and set about to build himself a contemplative tower on the far northern tip of the island. This place, which he called Heart's Ease, watched out on the northern seas, which extended out into darkness and infinity, beyond sight or understanding. There were no more islands, and no more men or women to be seen out there. There was only peace and silence, and the endless moment in which to savor nothingness.
Vandar looked back at the Monastery. Beyond it was another round and grassy hill. This was really just the southern end of a long a treeless ridge that lined the west side of the island, in the center of which stood the old Monastery. Shepherds grazed their flocks on the southern hill, tiny figures wrapped in sheepskin cloaks to keep out the damp chill. It was a cloudy and windy day on the island of the Monastery, just like every other day.
The eastern slope of the ridge, below the Monastery, ended in a tangle of pastures and farming fields, then gave way to the forest that covered the rest of the island. The trees stretched out in a great mass of green towers, and the sea took up beyond.
Between the ridge and the forest lay the villages of the Harkess clan. Directly below the Monastery lay the village of the herders and farmers around the pool of the ram's head. It was they who grazed their sheep along the ridge, and they who coaxed potatos from the cold ground. At the southern end of the island, at the foot of the slope of the southern hill, lay a small harbor and the village of the fishermen. Their longboats sailed at dawn every day, and the fish they pulled from the sea graced every table on the island. There were scut and murmurer in these waters, and the soulfish (whose belly glowed as it died), and the floater, which yielded a week's worth of food for the whole island if it could be hauled back to the harbor. They were huge but rare, and the capture of a floater usually meant a holiday for the fishing village.
This was the island of the exiles. The Harkess lord in his Monastery, the farmers and shepherds, the fishermen. All descended from the Harkesses who fled Thane, all safe from the slavery imposed by the Devils, all alone on their dank and remote island, in the shadow of the cliffs of the world itself. How high did those cliffs go, Vandar wondered as he gazed upward, over the Monastery, at the sheer rock face and the clouds that gathered up against it. They could rise no further, yet far beyond them lay all that mattered to him as a future lord and a man. There lay the Devils and the land of Thane. There lay the monsters who stole the world. There lay his future.
Vandar had taken another vow before Mericet. He knew the old man's face now, and he understood that Mericet might have forbidden him to leave the island. He was glad that his father Larniku was lord now. He could see that Vandar had a greater contribution to make than to sit forever in exile.
He had broken faith. He would never return.
* * *
The longboats left the village of the fishermen just past dawn. Vandar watched them go. They rowed out from the safety of the harbor and onto the roiling sea. Huge swells passed as a matter of course beneath the boats, whose masters were well accustomed to steering over them. When they neared the great wall of the world the swells became trickier and more violent. The fishermen dropped long hooks down into the depths while their rowers kept the boats from hitting the rock wall. This was a dangerous life. Many times boats had collided with the rocks, or overturned when crazy waves met beneath them, and not many and islander could swim.
Not so rare, and just as deadly, were the things that dropped from the sky. High above them at the tops of the cliffs walked animals and perhaps people. How long did it take for rocks dislodged by footfalls along the edge of the world up there take to fall out of sight, through the cloud layer, and down into the sea itself? How many Thanian boats had been punctured by the projectiles that fell from the sky? And it was not always rocks. It could be a deer (which had happened once), or a man (which had not happened yet). Any large object could prove fatal to the inhabitants of a fishing boat from the island.
Some fishermen did not watch the sky. They trolled the shallow waters on the landward side of the island itself, and they did their hunting with spears. They wrestled with the pumafish and snarkers that sometimes preyed in those waters, and they had lost more than one man to the poisoned tentacles of the loathsome watermen, which walked like men on the bottom of the sea, very like the damned of the world itself. Certain families had taken the shallows as their place, and these were the risks they ran, just as the others who knew the rock faces of the world ran their own risks. It was the way of the Thanians to fish where they would (said these Harkess clansmen), and they had no use for fear.
"May our swords be good and our words be good," went the anthem of the Harkess family. "May the Wheel turn."
* * *
The rowers pulled on their oars and the skiff gained speed. Within the confines of the harbor of the south village, it moved smoothly along the flat surface of the cold water. It moved past the south hill, away from the distant Monastery and its villages, and out toward the open sea.
They had made their goodbyes simple and quiet. Love to parents, love to brothers (for Vandar, none), love to sisters (just the forever silent Petra), and a vow of return. As Vandar left his parents and sister to whatever their future might be and walked down the long hill toward the fisher-village, his father had followed him for a few steps and taken him by the arm. "One final word from your father, son," Lord Harkess had said with the air of a man who realized that he would not see his son again. "Do not lose your honor!"
"I won't, father. Thank you."
The adventurers met at the edge of the fisher-village. where, as a final gift, the fisherman father of their friend Lazar had agreed to transport them to the hidden crevasse where they would begin their journey. Lazar's father steered the boat now, as Torjek and Koeno rowed. Vandar sat at the prow, studying the cliffs with a new and more urgent sense than every before.
The clouds hung in the sky, and the rock face of the world was like the walls of a pit. All around the small boat, which went out of the harbor and onto the blue sea, the waves grew larger and more crafty. Mericet Harkess had stood at the island's northern point and wondered if there lay another sanctuary, another land to which they ought to flee. He had decided against it. Many years later, Vandar had stood very near the same spot and wondered what sort of a boat it might take to reach the far side of the northern sea (the existence of which he had postulated to a reasonably firm degree). How many days worth of food and water? How many oarsmen? The most important question was this: would one ever reach a place that was beyond the sight of the cliffs of the world? Would one pass beyond that point?
Vandar thought about those questions as the boat went out into the straits. The salty air whipped across his face and the faces of his companions. He had sworn that they would escape the island, that they would all be free men together, that he would return to Thane and fight the Devils and die like a man. His two friends Torjek and Koeno came with him. All three of them were made tough by the endless winters on the island, when ice made everything slick and deadly, when the ice accumulated along the interior walls of every home, when the frozen corpses of the dead lay endlessly in their pallets awaiting the damp springtime, when the cold and lonely souls gathered and prayed over the Wheel, when steam poured off the ram's head pool, when one could walk on the frozen sea out far from the island without fear of slipping into the depths and being consumed by the watermen, and when the icy fingers of the wind pushed lovers together from confinement and lust. "We will walk together as men," they had said on their last night on the island, when they drank wine in the wood and saw no future but their own. "We three friends. May our swords be good and our word be good. May the Wheel turn!"
Now Vandar looked back toward the island of the Monastery with a feeling that was oddly sad. He had passed his whole life there, but that life was over. He had left his father and mother and sister in the ancient and still hilltop Monastery, and the said farewells would never be enough. To his father he had little left to express. In truth, had his father not blessed his journey he might have fled anyway. To his mother all that was possible had long since passed between them. To his sister, however, whose visage was like death and whose love was locked away inside her, he had a sudden and clear sense of failed responsibility. He could no longer look out for her, no longer protect her from the barbs of the other islanders, no longer be her only friend.
There was guilt in his heart, but only a little. The Wheel had turned. He had no place on the island any longer.
The cries of black birds circling high overhead caught Vandar's attention, and he looked up at the endless rock wall, the world-cliff's face, and the circling birds called to one another and flew up the rock face on winds. They became specks against the grey wall, and their cries were lost in the roar of the waves against the distant cliffs, the lapping of the water against the skiffs and the oars. Concern intruded on Vandar: how would they sleep on the boat tonight?
He looked at his two friends, and their faces were frozen in grins of adventure and fear. The wind whipped across them, the waves buffeted them, and their swords were still sheathed, like Vandar's own short sword. Torjek's long blond hair lay in heap around his shoulders, and his black beard seemed to belong to a man ten years older. He looked out across the sea at the cliffs, and back to the island.
"Come with us!" He said to Lazar's father in a sudden rush, but the man only smiled and shook his head. "Thank you my lord Vandar, but I must stay with my family. I have already lost one son. I cannot lose another minute with them. I will steer you there. That will be enough for me."
Vandar nodded in acceptance. His friends rowed on.
"Can you see the Monastery?" Vandar asked.
"It is a safe distance," Koeno said. "We are safe from it now, from the endless sleep of the poor cold island. Let them sleep forever in their peace, but let it be theirs alone!"
"We shall come back to them with news of Thane," Torjek said.
Vandar did not think so.
"Give me the wandering life," He intoned grandly. "Give me a sword and a bottle! Give me a dark night and the howl of wolves, give me a swamp and dogs in pursuit. Give me one day on the field, with my brothers at my side, give me one day of glory. I would trade it all for those things with you, my brothers!"
His voice trailed off and the three of them looked at the cliffs of the great wall of the world. Vandar realized that he did not have to make such claims anymore. He did not have to boast or issue oaths, did not have to swear that his quiet princely life would not do. He did not have to posture anymore, because he had kept his word. He had sworn to leave the island, and he had done it. No man could call him a coward now.
Torjek and Koeno looked at him.
"My your sword be good and your word be good..." said Torjek. He smiled proudly as he said it.
"It is, friend! It is!" Koeno laughed. He hooted long and loud, and clapped his hands. The boat rocked underneath them as a strong wave moved toward the cliff. Torjek lurched toward the edge in a moment of lost balance, and Koeno and Vandar both reached for him.
"May the Wheel turn..." Torjek said, finishing the Harkess credo. He slapped at his friends' hands, and then they all three put their hands together.
"We three friends," Vandar said, "we three friends shall see every corner of the world! We shall tramp in the rivers of Thane and leave our mark all across the land. They shall always say: here went those three bastards that stole our daughters and our fortunes, that killed our Devil-lords and set us all to running back home."
Torjek and Koeno laughed. His speech was an old joke between them now, and had been repeated on black nights and in drunken rages, on the last northern hill of the island and in whispers between the friends in a crowded banquet at the Monastery itself. And his friends always laughed. Torjek with his blond hair and black beard, with his stately swordsmanship and his charms for the ladies, whose eyes were like water and whose words could be those of a poet. Koeno laughed too--Koeno the joker, the asp, the night-spirit. Koeno whose talent was mockery and verbal tactics, whose words were like knives, who had been at Vandar's sides since the dawn of consciousness.
Vandar looked back toward the island. I shall not see you again, he thought of his father, the Lord Harkess. Goodbye mother. Goodbye sister.
Vandar's stomach roiled with the waves as the tiny skiff rolled between them and atop another. He had never been in a fishing boat, never once before this moment. That particular pleasure was banned for the Lord and his heir by the decree of the great Mericet Harkess on the day he landed on the island. It was the sentence of the lord and his sons, that they should remain here until summoned by the Wood. Mericet had abandoned the world and forced his sons to do the same. Never once had the Wood made itself heard. The Harkess lords had all followed his wishes, and had become progressively more docile and weak, and not until this day had one disobeyed the command. Larniku sent them forth because he knew the family was dying. Not until this day had Vandar had his choice in anything in life.
He had chosen freedom. He had chosen the world up above the cliffs. He had chosen the sword.
The Wheel had turned.
They rowed through the silvery moonlit night. When the sun rose, casting its long grey shadows from its place hidden behind the cliffs, they rowed still. No more speeches were heard on the boat. No more boasts.
* * *
The tiny skiff crawled in parallel to the cliffs, and the sun shone from high in the sky at mid-day before they rounded a long outcropping. The three friends took turns at the large steering oar at the flat stern. It was Vandar's turn when they passed around the north-facing tip of this tower of rock. It was like a turret to defend the world against the assault of the cold sea. Vandar studied the grey cliffs, which led upward into the mists, and he wondered what beasts stood at the edge of the world at that very moment, gazing down into nothingness and wondering what would happen if they slipped from their footings. Were they men? Were they Thanians?
Lazar's father steered them all the way. "We're coming to it!" He said. "You'll be there soon!"
As the skiff came around the great outcropping, another long wall of cliffs was revealed to them. Only it seemed to Vandar that there was something different about this view. It was unlike the view that had been available to them on the island. Vandar narrowed his attention on a distant section of cliff wall that now came into view. It was like a great crack in the world, which was narrow where the sea washed up against it but which widened as it reached up toward the clouds. It was a scar, a wound in the earth's side, and Vandar was sure in an instant that it was the spot from which the Harkess clan had sailed out to the island. It had to be.
"Look friends!" Vandar shouted. "The gateway to our homeland!" Torjek and Koeno stopped rowing for a moment and rubbed their sore arms as they looked out across the sea. Their faces were red and they drank thirstily from their watersacks.
It was told in the tale of Mericet Harkess that he led his people down from their pursuers through a great crevasse in the earth, and that at the end of a steep and dark path, they found boats and a dock. They had lost everything, and had had only their honor to warm them in the depths of the crevasse. When they came to the island, they were welcomed by the monks who lived there. It was the monks who built the Monastery, and who sustained it in part through contributions from the Harkess fortune. It was also the monks who were killed by the Harkess fighters after ten years of co-existence, when the lord Visser Harkess established the family's final rule over the island.
The skiff rose atop the swells, and Torjek and Koeno rowed harder in waters that grew more violent as they approached their goal. Lazar's father held onto the steering oar. If the boat were swamped, they would all drown. Not one of them could swim.
The skiff heaved upward with the waves. Vandar's stomach dropped inside him. He held onto the oar. "Closer!" Lazar's father called out to Torjek and Koeno, who rowed harder than ever. They did so without question, without hesitation.
They approached the entrance to the crevasse. High above them, the two sides of it separated and rose in parallel, high up into the grey clouds that overhung the sea. White water poured out of the dark opening in the cliff, then from the sea-side a wave sped through the foam and plunged into the dark crevasse. From within came a great deep roar, and all four of the men in the skiff listened quietly.
Vandar exulted. They were so close. So near to the goal. His friends looked to him. White swirls surrounded the skiff now, and swells moved beneath it with such force that Vandar's stomach became sour and confused.
"It is rough today!" Lazar's father shouted. "We should wait!"
"No!" Vandar shouted. "Closer!"
Torjek and Koeno rowed with all their strength. Foam flew up from the water and flecked their faces with white spots. As the tiny skiff approached the dark opening in the rock, another wave plunged into the darkness. This emitted the same rushing roar that they had heard before, but now they were much closer to the source. It was overpoweringly loud, and Vandar tightened with anxiety. The waves were so high, and the violence of the crevasse so clear, that he began to doubt that they could enter it successfully. It seemed like a fatal mission, and he had no wish to die foolishly.
From the mouth of the crevasse poured white foaming backwater. It came in force, and sent a wave of its own back at the sea which met an incoming wave with a loud CLAP and spray flew high overhead. Then the wave came at the skiff. Vandar watched the wave descend on them with no reaction at all. The wave moved like lightning, and the bow of the skiff tipped upward as the wave passed under it. The four men grabbed handholds as the skiff rode over the wave and righted itself. Lazar's father kept one hand on the steering oar.
He turned around to watch as the counter-wave raced out to the sea. It met another incoming wave and water splashed up as the two waves CLAPPED together, then each one continued in its direction. The incoming wave passed underneath the skiff and carried it closer to the mouth of the crevasse.
The roar of the waves was overwhelming. The proximity to the cliff walls terrifying. Torjek shouted to Vandar, but Vandar could not make out the words. He understood only the fear in Torjek's eyes. Lazar's father held onto the steering oar, but he could not use it to any effect. It dangled behind the skiff uselessly. He looked up at the cliff walls, and wondered for a brief moment of clarity whether one could climb the cliffs themselves. He looked back at Lazar's father. He could read the man's face.
"We must turn around!" Lazar's father shouted.
Torjet and Koeno rowed together in the swirling waters. Another wave poured out from the crevasse and nearly overturned the skiff. Vandar took no fear this time, but he could not control the skiff. It turned in circles as the waters sucked it toward the crevasse. The crevasse loomed just before them, and they turned in uncontrollable circles. Torjek and Koeno yelled to one another and to Vandar, but he could not make out their words. He recognized the fear, but that was no surprise. He was sure that somewhere down beneath his confusion he was afraid too. There was just nothing he could do to stop what happened next.
Another wave gathered beneath the skiff, and carried it toward the mouth of the crevasse while two of its passengers rowed at cross-purposes and a third sat still in dumb amazement. Lazar's father shouted out to them, but Vandar could not hear him. The sides of the crevasse rose up from the roiling waters like great columns, and the salty wind came out of its mouth like the exhalation of a monster. There was a line between daylight and shadow, a line that the skiff crossed as it rode atop the wave and entered the crevasse itself.
The skiff hurdled forward into the darkness.
Lazar's father dropped his steering oar and gripped the wall of the skiff with both hands. The water was like a god now, and laughing. He shouted to the three friends. "Hold on tight! We're going in!"
Then he and Vandar locked eyes, just for a moment.
The prow of the skiff had, by chance, faced forward in the few seconds that the wave carried it into the crevasse. And the skiff slid down the front of the wave it had cut into the water neatly, and this alone had kept it from overturning at the high speed and crazy angle at which it now traveled. Lazar's father waved Vandar backward, away from the prow. Vandar now stood up nearly straight and leapt backward between Torjek and Koeno. Lazar's father took him by the hand and pulled him to the back of the skiff. Then the prow suddenly plunged beneath the surface of the water. They were swamped. Torjek and Koeno both shouted in panic. Then the force of the wave pushed the back of the boat up over the front.
Vandar rose up over his friends and for a weird instant looked down on them as he passed overhead. Then the skiff came down and water filled his mouth. He was cast free of the boat and sucked into the force of the wave. He went end over end as water sprayed at him from every direction.
It was as if he were flying in a dream.