The Bristling Wood - Katharine Kerr [54]
“Behold the voices of the god!” Pedraddyn cried.
The ocean roar answered him with a hundred tongues. As they slowly made their way down the damp, treacherous stairs cut into the side of the rocky cliff, the roar and boom of the surf grew so deafening that it seemed to echo inside Nevyn’s mind as well as in his ears. At the tide line the three of them knelt on the slimy gravel and raised their hands palm outward to the oracle. Each great wave swept in like an omen, spraying over the rocks and swirling with white foam up almost to their knees.
“O mighty Wmm,” Nevyn called out. “We beg you: guide us in choosing the one true king of all Deverry. O mighty Wmm, put the true king on the throne and no other. O mighty Wmm, lend us your power to tell truth from falsehood.”
One after the other, the waves swept in from the gray, misty ocean that might have broken on Eldidd’s shore or on that of the Otherlands, for all they could tell. The voices roared and boomed incomprehensible answers to Nevyn’s question. All at once, Cinrae sobbed and rose slowly to his feet, his eyes staring all-unseeing in deep trance. When he spoke, his thin lad’s tenor had changed into a voice as deep and hollow as wave on rock.
“Look in the north and west. The lad who will be king has been born in the north and west. The king of all Deverry and all Eldidd has been born in a lake among the fishes and the water reeds. He who will give peace trains for war.”
With a sharp cry Cinrae fainted, falling forward headlong as the god left him. Nevyn and Pedraddyn raised him up, then carried him away from the tide line to the tenuous shelter of the foot of the cliff. Pedraddyn stripped off his own cloak and wrapped it around the boy.
“Nevyn, he’s the priest you get only once in a hundred years, if that. He’ll succeed me and surpass me a thousand times. I thank the god every day for bringing him here.”
“So you should, and for his sake, too. I don’t know what would have happened to him if he hadn’t found the way of the god.”
“Oh, his family thought he was a bit simpleminded, sure enough. They brought him here to ask the god’s advice when he was but a tiny lad, and he’s never left. Sometimes I wonder if there’s some Westfolk blood in our Cinrae, but of course I couldn’t possibly go asking his kin a shameful thing like that.” He laid a fatherly hand on the boy’s cheek. “He’s icy cold. I wish we could get him away from the damp.”
“Naught easier. Just give him to me.”
Nevyn called on the spirits of the elements, an almost automatic task there in that rage and vortex of elemental force, and asked them to support the lad’s weight. With their help, he picked Cinrae up like a sack of grain and carried him up the steps without even having to pause for breath. He brought the lad well away from the edge, then laid him down gently in the cushioning grass while Pedraddyn stared in utter amazement. In a few minutes Cinrae tossed his head this way and that, then opened his eyes.
“I can walk soon, Your Holiness,” he whispered.
“When you’re ready, lad, and not before.” Pedraddyn knelt down beside him. “And someday soon you’ll learn how to control the force of the god.”
Nevyn walked a few steps away and turned to look over the distant swirl of fog and ocean. The voices of the god echoed softly in the distance. North and west, he thought; I would have been wasting my time if I’d gone to Cerrmor. He had no doubt that the omen was a true one; reinforced by the ritual and the dramatic physical setup of the oracle, Cinrae’s raw psychic talent had tapped in deep to the Deverry racial soul. Born in the midst of reeds and fishes—that particular phrase bothered him, but he was sure