“There’s a bit more to it than that, father,” she said. “What about their cannibalism?”
“That was a mistake. Somebody misinterpreted a passage in one of their sacred texts, that’s all. They did it out of a sense of religious obligation, not out of appetite. On the whole, I rather liked the Marags. They were generous, friendly, and very honest with each other. They enjoyed life. If it hadn’t been for the gold here, they’d probably have worked out their little aberration.”
Garion had forgotten about the gold. As they crossed a small stream, he looked down into the sparkling water and saw the butter-yellow flecks glittering among the pebbles on the bottom.
A naked ghost suddenly appeared before him. “Don’t you think I’m beautiful?” she leered. Then she took hold of the sides of the great slash that ran up her abdomen, pulled it open and spilled out her entrails in a pile on the bank of the stream.
Garion gagged and clenched his teeth together.
“Don’t think about the gold!” the voice in his mind said sharply. “The ghosts come at you through your greed. If you think about gold, you’ll go mad.”
They rode on, and Garion tried to push the thought of gold out of his mind.
Mister Wolf, however, continued to talk about it. “That’s always been the problem with gold. It seems to attract the worst kind of people – the Tolnedrans in this case.”
“They were trying to stamp out cannibalism, father,” Aunt Pol replied. “That’s a custom most people find repugnant.”
“I wonder how serious they’d have been about it if all that gold hadn’t been lying on the bed of every stream in Maragor.”
Aunt Pol averted her eyes from the ghost of a child impaled on a Tolnedran spear. “And now no one has the gold,” she said. “Mara saw to that.”
“Yes,” Wolf agreed, lifting his face to listen to the dreadful wail that seemed to come from everywhere. He winced at a particularly shrill note in the wailing. “I wish he wouldn’t scream so loud.”
They passed the ruins of what appeared to have been a temple. The white stones were tumbled, and grass grew up among them. A broad tree standing nearby was festooned with hanging bodies, twisting and swinging on their ropes. “Let us down,” the bodies murmured. “Let us down.”
“Father!” Aunt Pol said sharply, pointing at the meadow beyond the fallen temple. “Over there! Those people are real.”
A procession of robed and hooded figures moved slowly through the meadow, chanting in unison to the sound of a mournfully tolling bell supported on a heavy pole they carried on their shoulders.
“The monks of Mar Terrin,” Wolf said. “Tolnedra’s conscience. They aren’t anything to worry about.”
One of the hooded figures looked up and saw them. “Go back!” he shouted. He broke away from the others and ran toward them, recoiling often from things Garion could not see. “Go back!” he cried again. “Save yourselves! You approach the very center of the horror. Mar Amon lies just beyond that hill. Mara himself rages through its haunted streets!”
Chapter Six
THE PROCESSION OF monks moved on, the sound of their chanting and slowly tolling bell growing fainter as they crossed the meadow. Mister Wolf seemed deep in thought, the fingers of his good hand stroking his beard. Finally he sighed rather wryly. “I suppose we might as well deal with him here and now, Pol. He’ll just follow us if we don’t.”
“You’re wasting your time, father,” Aunt Pol replied. “There’s no way to reason with him. We’ve tried before.”
“You’re probably right,” he agreed, “but we should try at least. Aldur would be disappointed if we didn’t. Maybe when he finds out what’s happening, he’ll come around to the point where we can at least talk to him.”
A piercing wail echoed across the sunny meadow, and Mister Wolf made a sour face. “You’d think that he’d have shrieked himself out by now. All right, let’s go to Mar Amon.” He turned his horse toward the hill the wild-eyed monk had pointed out to them. A maimed ghost gibbered at him from the air in front of his face. “Oh, stop that!” he said irritably. With a startled flicker, the ghost disappeared.
There had perhaps been a road leading over the hill at some time in the past. The faint track of it was dimly visible through the grass, but the thirty-two centuries which had passed since the last living foot had touched its surface had all but erased it. They wound to the top of the hill and looked down into the ruins of Mar Amon. Garion, still detached and unmoved, perceived and deduced things about the city he would not have otherwise noted. Though the destruction had been nearly total, the shape of the city was clearly evident. The street – for there was only one – was laid out in a spiral, winding in toward a broad, circular plaza in the precise center of the ruins. With a peculiar flash of insight, Garion became immediately convinced that the city had been designed by a woman. Men’s minds ran to straight lines, but women thought more in terms of circles.
With Aunt Pol and Mister Wolf in the lead and the rest following in wooden-faced unconsciousness, they started down the hill to the city. Garion rode at the rear, trying to ignore the ghosts rising from the earth to confront him with their nudity and their hideous maiming. The wailing sound which they had heard from the moment they had entered Maragor grew louder, more distinct. The wail had sometimes seemed to be a chorus, confused and distorted by echoes, but now Garion realized that it was one single, mighty voice, filled with a grief so vast that it reverberated through all the kingdom.
As they approached the city, a terrible wind seemed to come up, deadly chill and filled with an overpowering charnel-house stench. As Garion reached automatically to draw his cloak tighter about him, he saw that the cloak did not in any way react to that wind, and that the tall grass through which they rode did not bend before it. He considered it, turning it over in his mind as he tried to close his nostrils to the putrid stench of decay and corruption carried on that ghostly wind. If the wind did not move the grass, it could not be a real wind. Furthermore, if the horses could not hear the wails, they could not be real wails either. He grew colder and he shivered, even as he told himself that the chill – like the wind and the grief laden howling – was spiritual rather than real.
Although Mar Amon, when he had first glimpsed it from the top of the hill, had appeared to be in total ruin, when they entered the city Garion was startled to see the substantial walls of houses and public buildings surrounding him; and somewhere not far away he seemed to hear the sound of laughing children. There was also the sound of singing off in the distance.
“Why does he keep doing this?” Aunt Pol asked sadly. “It doesn’t do any good.”
“It’s all he has, Pol,” Mister Wolf replied.
“It always ends the same way, though.”
“I know, but for a little while it helps him forget.”
“There are things we’d all like to forget, father. This isn’t the way to do it.”
Wolf looked admiringly at the substantial-seeming houses around them. “It’s very good, you know.”
“Naturally,” she said. “He’s a God, after all – but it’s still not good for him.”
It was not until Barak’s horse inadvertently stepped directly through one of the walls – disappearing through the solid-looking stone and then reemerging several yards farther down the street – that Garion understood what his Aunt and grandfather were talking about. The walls, the buildings, the whole city was an illusion – a memory. The chill wind with its stink of corruption seemed to grow stronger and carried with it now the added reek of smoke. Though Garion could still see the sunlight shining brightly on the grass, it seemed for some reason that it was growing noticeably darker. The laughter of children and the distant singing faded; instead, Garion heard screams.
A Tolnedran legionnaire in burnished breastplate and plumed helmet, as solid-looking as the walls around them, came running down the long curve of the street. His sword dripped blood, his face was fixed in a hideous grin, and his eyes were wild.
Hacked and mutilated bodies sprawled in the street now, and there was blood everywhere. The waiting climbed into a piercing shriek as the illusion moved on toward its dreadful climax.
The spiral street opened at last into the broad circular plaza at the center of Mar Amon. The icy wind seemed to howl through the burning city, and the dreadful sound of swords chopping through flesh and bone seemed to fill Garion’s entire mind. The air grew even darker.