Kings of the North - Elizabeth Moon [67]
One page had genealogy … he recognized his great-great-great-great-grandfather’s name at the bottom in spidery writing. Up the page … he began jotting the names down; this was older than the Family Roll in which he’d listed his sons.
The sheet beneath, the ink much faded, bore the inscription “To the right honorable, the faithful, the most noble Va-Jeddrinal—This being the copy you asked for, the which I most humbly present for your pleasure, of the oldest known record in the north, of the Fall of Aare and the King’s Quest, as recorded by Mikeli himself in the fifth year of exile in the north.”
Jeddrin stared. No one had a copy of the Fall of Aare, though the story was known. The lords of Aare suffered a defeat of some kind and came north across the sea … could this treasure have lain so long in his archives unrecognized? Apparently so.
In another hand, the work began, “I, Mikeli, heir of the kings of Aare, sing the lament of Aare’s fall, the Sandlord’s ruin, the towers that shattered and the waters that vanished, as a lament but also a warning to those who follow, that they may escape the ruin that still roams the world below.”
That was plain enough. Ibbirun, the Sandlord, god of chaos, had sent waves of sand to swallow the cities of Aare. Jeddrin felt his skin prickle with awe and dread. He read on and on, as the light faded and servants brought lamps and food and drink. He ate nothing, absorbed in the story he thought he knew, but had known wrong, from the start. Though the language was archaic, he had studied old texts before, and few of the words puzzled him.
When he finished at last, in the dark, silent hours, and lifted his gaze to the sky, the stars before morning hung before him, challenging. The men of Old Aare, the men he had thought of with respect—his ancestors, those who had survived the Fall and the hard journey north, the sea and its storms, to land on the shores of this land and conquer it, who had even—in attenuated blood, as he thought—gone over the pass of Valdaire to conquer the north—those men, those magelords, had not been, but for Mikeli and perhaps a few others, the nobles of Aare.
They had been servants, crafters, merchants, and—Mikeli made it clear—thieves and whores as well, the scum of the city, lifted on a tide of disaster and tossed away, while the nobles—nearly all of them—died.
“For of the princes of Aare, and the princesses, the lords and ladies, all those of high degree, now so few are left that to populate one palace with those of pure blood is scarcely possible …”
The nobility of Aarenis, Jeddrin read, had been created out of what was left: “As I was sent ahead, to be saved against my will while all around me knew their doom, so I must do what I can to redeem my guilt, and theirs, and make this story plain … and for Aare to continue in men’s hearts, I must create from nothing a semblance of its greatness.” Mikeli then explained how he had chosen this one and that to be duke or count or baron and how he had striven to ensure that literacy survived, and arts and crafts.
For a long bitter time Jeddrin stood looking out at the night, hands clenched on the railing of his loggia. So the despised mercenary captain proved a true king, the born son of a king and an elf-queen, while he—who had been so sure of his lineage—traced back, as the tale made clear, to a stonemason and a count’s bastard daughter. Kieri Phelan was royal, and he himself as common as dirt, all his pride of blood based on lies, on the accumulated wealth of a fellow—a great-father those many generations back—who was strong and honest—the qualities for which he was chosen—and whose wife, chosen for him by the prince, could read and write. Mikeli in his wisdom—if that is what it was—had assigned masons to the stony lands and wood-crafters to the forests.
“If the gods favor us, perhaps the gift of magery will survive, but if it does not, so many being drawn from crafters will ensure that none go naked or roofless.”
Jeddrin thought of his own domain, where indeed skill at masonry and abundant rock meant none of