Chapter 53: On the Brink

The triumphant tone in Olyrrwd’s voice shifted abruptly to something much grimmer as he described how he’d scrambled up to the top of the last ridge to see Caelym at the brink of the cliff “stripping off his clothes, casting them over the edge and getting ready to leap after them.”

Picturing his cousin there, exhausted and out of breath but still fiercely determined, Herrwn ventured, “So you rushed on to take hold of him and pull him back!”

“The Goddess knows I wanted to, but I didn’t dare! Not when he was so close to the edge that any wrong move would have sent him over.”

“Then what did you do?”

“I hid! Ducked behind a tree to catch my breath and try to think of anything I could say to call him back to me.”

“And that was?”

“Nothing!”

“But—”

“There was nothing I could say, because I’m not Rhedwyn.”

“You’ve given him more love and care than—”

“That didn’t matter! What mattered was that he’d walk through fire to have Rhedwyn look in his direction, so I guessed he’d walk away from the edge of the cliff if I could make him believe I was Rhedwyn’s ghost calling his name and offering to take him for a horseback ride!”

“But how—”

“How could I hope to look—or sound—like Rhedwyn?”

Herrwn hadn’t meant his question to be quite so blatant, but Olyrrwd waved his apologies aside, going on, “Well, if he were still alive, there wouldn’t be much chance of it, but I thought that—with the fog to help—I might look and sound as good as a man who’d been dead for going on five years. Anyway, thinking back to our beginning oratory lessons and how your father always said you needed to become the character for whom you speak, I imagined myself as a ghoul returned from the spirit world and called out, ‘Caelym, oh, Caelym, I’ve come for you!’—throwing in, ‘I have your horse!’ for good measure.”

“And he believed you—”

“He did at first—at least long enough to turn around and take a step away from the edge. He realized it was me before I could reach him, though, and I would have lost him then and there, but I held out the toy horse to show I wasn’t lying to him and he snatched at it, shouting, ‘That’s mine! Give it to me’—no doubt meaning to take it with him when he jumped. Seeing my chance, I tempted him with it, waving it just out of his reach and keeping him arguing with me about it, until I’d backed far enough away from the edge that I dared grab hold of him. At first he tried to break free, but he was chilled to the bone and shaking like a leaf and I got my cloak wrapped around him and held him fast, and finally he gave up and just clung to me, sobbing like a baby, saying over and over how he had to be an oracle to see and hear Rhedwyn and now he’d failed his test and wouldn’t ever get to see him or hear him!”

“What did you say?”

“Whatever I could think of. Most of it was just silly nonsense—something about if it was a ghost he wanted to talk to, he’d do better to come along back to the healing chamber, where there are ghosts aplenty and all of them ready to talk, especially when it comes to complaining about what I should or shouldn’t have done—as if they know more about what killed them than I do.”

“Did that help?”

“Not particularly—he just went on about how he’d done everything right when he sacrificed the little goat, but its entrails hadn’t told him anything except that it wanted its mother, and then he’d found the baby owl that he’d had to sacrifice to tell the future, but all he’d seen was that if he did it would just be dead, so he hadn’t, but that was wrong and he was a disgrace to his mother, and Ossiam had told him he couldn’t be a disciple or learn answers beyond the reach of ordinary minds but hadn’t told him whether he was supposed to drink the poison first and then stab himself and then jump off the cliff or stab himself first and then drink the poison and then jump off the cliff or jump off the cliff first and drink the poison and stab himself on the way down, until I’d had enough of it and I said, ‘Ossiam has said you are not his disciple, and for once he’s right—you are my disciple, and I am commanding you to come with me!’ Then I took him by his hand, like I used to when he was little, and I led him back here and gave him some warm mush and put him down for a nap. Leaving Moelwyn to watch over him, I took a litter and got Benyon to help me move you here, tucked you in, and waited to see which of you would wake up first. Caelym did, so I put him to work being a healer, with you as his patient.”

With that, Olyrrwd concluded his rendition and shifted quite anticlimactically into a discourse over what other cures might still be necessary if Herrwn did not lie back down and let the current one do its work.

Herrwn put out his hand—partly because he was certain that the fetid goat’s liver bound to the back of his head was quite sufficient to fend off any malevolent spirits within smelling distance of it whether he was sitting up or lying down, but also because there was something in Olyrrwd’s account that didn’t add up.

While his recollections of the previous day were cloudy, when Herrwn tallied the time that Olyrrwd had spent questioning the cook’s grandson, the time he spent confronting Ossiam, and the time it would have taken to climb up to the overlook above the Bottomless Falls—and while Olyrrwd was rightfully proud of his remarkable burst of speed, Caelym certainly would have been faster—it must have been approaching noon before Olyrrwd reached the top of the cliff, and by Nimrrwn’s account, Caelym had left the shrine just after dawn.

Glad to have an excuse to change the subject, he interrupted Olyrrwd’s enthusiastic description of having once cured a patient who’d suffered an injury somewhat similar to Herrwn’s by drilling a hole in the top of his head to say, “The one thing that still puzzles me—mind you, I am grateful for whatever the reason might be, but—starting so long after him, how were you able to reach Caelym in time?”

“I wondered about that as well but didn’t want to put the question to him in a way that suggested he should have gone quicker—and it turned out I didn’t need to because, as he was crying about all his dismal failures, he moaned, ‘What if Rhedwyn was there calling me, like Ossiam said, but got tired of waiting and left?’ and then sniffled that he had come as fast as he could but he kept getting lost in the fog. That was it! Just the stupid, dumb luck that by the time I set out the fog was starting to lift, and it kept on rising up above my head all the while I was climbing up the trail—and don’t think I am not grateful to be short, because I could see my way under it, and that was how I got there in time!”

It was then that all the pieces fell into place for Herrwn.

While Olyrrwd now insisted it was simply a matter of luck that the fog had come and gone when it did, had he not proclaimed to Ossiam that “the Mother-Goddess sees all things and knows all things”?

And had Ossiam himself not acknowledged that the forces of nature were “the divine power of the Goddess”?

So was it mere coincidence that the eerie mist had swirled into the valley so soon after Caelym sent his seemingly ill-advised invocation to the next world, or could it have been that Caelendra had heard her son’s message, seen the danger he was in, and sent the fog—wrapping it around him like a mother’s cloak and keeping him back from the edge of the cliff until Olyrrwd could get there?

That was what he thought happened and that was what he said to Olyrrwd, fully expecting his cousin, who had little faith in mystical explanations of events, to dismiss it out of hand.

Instead, Olyrrwd seemed to ponder this seriously and said, “Well, I suppose it could be.” And then, with the first glimmer of puckish humor Herrwn had seen on his cousin’s face since Ossiam had taken Caelym into oracular studies, he added, “And I think I will say exactly that to Ossie the next time I have a chance.”