16
A shout that was not a shout but a wind-voice came out of Morgon. The High One turned to flame in his hands, and then into a memory. The sound he had made reverberated through the tower: a low bass note that built and built until the stones around him began to shake. Winds were battering at the tower; he felt struck and struck again, like a harp string, by his grief. He did not know, out of all the wild, chaotic, beautiful voices around him, which was his own. He groped for his harp. The stars on it had turned night-black. He swept his hand, or the knife-edge of a wind, across it. The strings snapped. As the low string wailed and broke, stone and illusion of stone shocked apart around him and began to fall.
Winds the color of the stones: of fire, of gold, of night, spiralled around him, then broke away. The tower roared around him and collapsed into a gigantic cairn. Morgon was flung on his hands and knees on the grass beside it. He could sense Ghisteslwchlohm and Eriel’s power nowhere, as if the High One had bound them, in that final moment, to his death. Snow whirled around him, melting almost as soon as it touched the ground. The sky was dead-white.
His mind was reeling with land-law. He heard the silence of grass roots under his hands; he stared at the broken mass of Wind Tower out of the unblinking eyes of a wraith of An at the edge of the plain. A great tree sagged in the rain on a wet hillside in the backlands; he felt its roots shift and loosen as it fell. A trumpeter in Astrin’s army was lifting his long, golden instrument to his mouth. The thoughts of the land-rulers snarled in Morgon’s mind, full of grief and fear, though they did not understand why. The entire realm seemed to form under his hands on the grass, pulling at him, stretching him from the cold, empty wastes to the elegant court at Anuin. He was stone, water, a dying field, a bird struggling against the wind, a king wounded and despairing on the beach below Wind Plain, vesta, wraiths, and a thousand fragile mysteries, shy witches, speaking pigs, and solitary towers that he had to find room for within his mind. The trumpeter set his lips to the horn and blew. At the same moment a Great Shout from the army of An blasted over the plain. The sounds, the urgent onslaught of knowledge, the loss that was boring into Morgon’s heart overwhelmed him suddenly. He cried out again, dropping against the earth, his face buried in the wet grass.
Power ripped through his mind, blurring the bindings he had formed with the earth. He realized that the death of the High One had unbound all the power of the Earth-Masters. He felt their minds, ancient, wild, like fire and sea, beautiful and deadly, intent on destroying him. He did not know how to fight them. Without moving, he saw them in his mind’s eye, fanning across Wind Plain from the sea, flowing like a wave in the shapes of men and animals, their minds riding before them, scenting. They touched him again and again, uprooting knowledge in his mind, breaking bindings he had inherited, until his awareness of trees in the oak forest, vesta, plow horses in Hed, farmers in Ruhn, tiny pieces of the realm began to disappear from his mind.
He felt it as another kind of loss, terrible and bewildering. He tried to fight it as he watched the wave draw closer, but it was as though he tried to stop the tide from pulling sand grains out of his hands. Astrin’s army and Mathom’s were thundering across the plain from north and south, their battle colors vivid as dying leaves against the whiter sky. They would be destroyed, Morgon knew, even the dead; no living awareness or memory of the dead could survive the power that was feeding even on his own power. Mathom rode at the head of his force; in the trees, Har was preparing to loose the vesta onto the plain. Danan’s miners, flanked by the Morgol’s guard, were beginning to follow Astrin’s warriors. He did not know how to help them. Then he realized that on the edge of the plain to the southeast, Eliard and the farmers of Hed, armed with little more than hammers and knives and their bare hands, were marching doggedly to his rescue.
He lifted his head; his awareness of them faltered suddenly as a mind blurred over his mind. The whole of the realm seemed to darken; portions of his life were slipping away from him. He gripped at it, his hands tangled in the grass, feeling that all the High One’s hope in him had been for nothing. Then, in some misty corner of his mind, a door opened. He saw Tristan come out onto the porch at Akren, shivering a little in the cold wind, her eyes dark and fearful, staring toward the tumult in the mainland.
He got to his knees and then to his feet, with all the enduring stubbornness that small island had instilled in him. A wind lashed across his face; he could barely keep his balance in it. He was standing in the heart of chaos. The living and the dead and the Earth-Masters were just about to converge around him; the land-law of the realm was being torn away from him; he had freed the winds. They were belling across the realm, telling him of forests bent to the breaking point, villages picked apart, thatch and shingle whirled away into the air. The sea was rousing; it would kill Heureu Ymris, if he did not act. Eliard would die if Morgon could not stop him. He tried to reach Eliard’s mind, but as he searched the plain, he only entangled himself hi a web of other minds.
They tore knowledge, power from him like a wave eating at a cliff. There seemed no escape from them, no image of peace he could form in his mind to deflect them. Then he saw something glittering in front of him: his broken harp, lying on the grass, its strings flashing silently, played by the wind.
A strong, clean fury that was not his own washed through him suddenly, burning away all the holds over his mind. It left his mind clear as fire. He found Raederle beside him, freeing him for one brief moment with her anger, and he could have gone on his knees to her, because she was still alive, because she was with him. In the one moment she had given him, he realized what he must do. Then the forces of the realm shocked together in front of him. Bones of the dead, shimmering mail and bright shields of the living, vesta white as the falling snow, the Morgol’s guard with their slender spears of silver and ash closed with the merciless, inhuman power of the Earth-Masters.
He heard, for the first time, the sorrowing cry a vesta made as it died, calling plaintively to its own. He felt the names of the dead blotted out like blown flames in his mind. Men and women fought with spears and swords, picks and battle axes against an enemy that kept to no single shape, but a constant, fluid changing that mesmerized opponents to despair and to death. Morgon felt them die, parts of himself. Danan’s miners fell like great, stolid trees; the farmers from Hed, viewing a foe beyond all their conceptions, nothing their placid history had ever suggested existed, seemed too confused even to defend themselves. Their lives were wrenched out of Morgon like rooted things. The plain was a living, snarling thing before his eyes, a piece of himself fighting for its life with no hope of survival against the dark, sinuous, sharp-toothed beast that determined the realm would die. In the few brief moments of battle, he felt the first of the land-rulers die.
He sensed the struggle in Heureu Ymris’ mind as, wounded and unaided, he tried to comprehend the turmoil in his land. His body was not strong enough for such torment. He died alone, hearing the crashing sea and the cries of the dying across Wind Plain. Morgon felt the life-force in the king drain back to Ymris. And on the battlefield, Astrin, fighting for his life, wrestled suddenly with an overwhelming grief, and the sudden wakening in him of all land-instinct.
His grief woke Morgon’s again, for the High One, for Heureu, for the realm itself, entrusted to his care and dying within him. His mind shook open on a harp note that was also a call to a south wind burning across the backlands. Note by note, all tuned to sorrow, he called the unbound winds back to Wind Plain.