With respectful irony, I saluted them, bowed and then spurred my massive black stallion, Solomon, along a rocky road populated in those days by deer, bears, goats and boar, all of them hunted by local farmers and bandits, who were frequently one and the same. The road would take me through the Devil's Garden and down to the western coast.
The local Slavs were in the main a coarse, rather pale people. They had wiped out most of their best bloodstock through complicated and extended family feuding. When they had that romantic touch of Mongolian blood, Dalmatians achieved a stunning beauty.
Elsewhere powerful cultures had arisen and influenced the world, but these rocks offered solace only to the troubled visionary. Along the coasts were a few pockets of civilization, but most of that was in decay, exhausted by tributes to a dozen powers.
Isprit itself had been the retirement palace of the Emperor Diocletian, who had famously divided the Roman Empire into three, then left its running to a triumvirate who quarreled and killed one another, as well as Diocletian's daughter. His confusing stamp on the politics of the region would last for millennia. The hapless ex-emperor, who had hoped to balance power between the various warring factions, was the last real inheritor of Caesar's authority. Now the old Empire was sustained chiefly by those who had rallied to Charlemagne after he had been crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the pope. Their translation of their greed for booty into a chivalric ideal created an extraordinary expansion whose conquests, frequently under the banner of religious reform, would not stop until they owned the Earth. Already the Normans had imposed their haughty and efficient feudalism onto much of France and England. They in turn would carry these methods across the world. Opinion in Rome agreed that the unruly Saxons and Angles needed the strong hand of the Dukes of Normandy to form them into a nation which might one day balance the power of the Holy Roman Emperor.
At the abbey, in exchange for their hospitality, I had retailed the gossip of the day. Of course, I had only so much curiosity about their world, and most of that related to my search. But much small talk is picked up in the taverns, which a wanderer like myself, largely shunned by all, is frequently forced to use. I had little interest in the details of these peoples' history. It was raw and unsophisticated compared to that of mine, and I was still Melni-bonean enough to feel a superiority to mortals of most persuasions.
Through my senses Count Ulric had the opportunity to witness the genesis of his clan into a nation, and in his dreams he experienced my dreams as if they were his own. He dreamed my dream as I dreamed his. But he did not live my dream as I did, and I suspect he remembers even less. How much he chooses to remember is his own affair.
The late summer sun was surprisingly hot on my overarmored head when I became aware of the nature of the landscape changing. The crags were sharper, the cliffs more terraced, and little streams echoed through deep valleys, giving the place an unearthly music. Clearly I had entered the Devil's Garden. The shale became much harder for my horse to negotiate.
The stark landscape was astonishingly beautiful. Little grew here. The smell of the occasional fir invigorated me. The great limestone crags sparkled in the summer sunshine. All the trails were treacherous. Narrow rivers dancing with vivid life poured in falls from level to level among strangely shaped rocks. The sun cast dense shadows, contrasting extremes of black and white, on the massive glittering cliffs which rose into the sky. Sudden lakes, icy blue beneath the sun, were turned by passing clouds into blinding sheets of reflective steel. Rock pools shone like coral in their delicacy of color. Groves of dark blue pines and fleshy oaks grew in the few spots of soil. Frequently I heard the rattle of loose rocks as a goat leaped for cover. Crumbling earth on worn stone. Ferns and willowherb growing in crevices. These were the familiar landscapes of a childhood when, as von Bek, I had holidayed here with my family, who kept a villa on the coast. It was also reminiscent of the hinterland of Melnibone, where the Phoorn, our dragon allies, had built their first magnificent city from fire and rock and little else.
As the day grew hotter still, the steady blue sky threw extremes of color everywhere. I began to feel an unlikely nostalgia. The experience was not entirely pleasant. All I understood was a sense of invasion, as if other intelligences attacked my own. Not merely my dream self intruded, but something older and heavier, something which reminded me again of Mu Ooria and invoked images, memories of events which perhaps had not yet even occurred in the history of this particular world.
Used to controlling myself in such circumstances, I was still very uneasy. My horse, Solomon, too, was growing nervous, perhaps reflecting my own mood. I wanted to get out of the place as soon as possible. Doggedly, we continued westward, the horse holding with uncanny ease to the path. Loose grey shale skittered and bounced steeply away from us. Sometimes it seemed we clung to the walls of the rock like lizards, staring down at the radically angled slopes, the glittering, weirdly colored waters far below.
That night I camped in a natural cave, having first made sure it was not the castle of an incumbent bear. It had not seen any kind of human settlement. Nothing in this landscape could sustain human life.
I rose early in the morning, watered, fed and saddled Solomon, set my war-gear about me, changed my helmet for a hood, and again was struck by the supernatural quality of the valley. At the far end in the distance was a wide, shimmering lake.
As I urged Solomon forward, I sensed other presences. I knew the smell of them, the weight of them. I had instinctive respect for them even though I was not really conscious of their identity. They were nearby and they were many. That was all I could be sure about. Beings seemingly older than the Off-Moo, who had seen every stage of the Earth's history. They remembered the moment when they had been expelled from the Sun's gassy Eden to begin the forming of this planet. Even the stars of this world's firmament were subtly different from mine. I knew it would be better to learn what the Devil's Garden had to tell me rather than impose my own Melnibonean speculation on the place. I sensed that this had once been a great battlefield. Here Law and Chaos had warred as they had never warred until now. It was one of the oldest supernaturally inhabited regions in this realm. It was one of the most remote. It was one of the most enduring. I was at last recognizing it for what it was. Its denizens were unaffected by the major movements of human history. They were philosophical beings who had witnessed so much more than any others, and they had seen all human ideals brought low by human folly. Yet they were incapable of cynicism. I knew them, just as I knew their young cousins, still hiding goat-footed in the rocks, still sliding in and out of trees and streams, still asking favors of Nature rather than making demands on her, the old godlings whom the Greeks had known, half-mortals who sensed their own extinction. These ancient creatures had such old, slow thought processes they were all but unde-tectable, yet they were the Earth's memory.
Their name for themselves took several mortal lifetimes to pronounce. Adepts gave them considerable attention. Few consulted them, though more knew how. Their answers were usually slowly considered, and the one who had asked could be dead before they reached a conclusion. When they slept it was for millions of years. When they awoke it might be for a few seconds. And they never wasted words. I was beginning to understand what Friar Tristelunne had hinted at. I had passed part of my apprenticeship among such ancients, but I was still uneasy. If Moonglum had been with me, he would have expressed reasonable fear and I should have mocked him for it, but now I was alone. I had survived a hundred great fights with less fear than now.