Chapter 6: "The Witness"

The priest saw more.

Blue hands wielding spears and clubs. Beating on the heads of men and boys. Screaming and choking on the dust, the blood, the fear. Their golden shields were unstoppable, their swords irresistible. They slashed at the fighters, whose blood fed the field. They gutted the shieldboys, hanged them upside down from their black banners, took heads for their trophies.

Here are your Masters for you... came the message of the singers.

The priest cried out, seeing it now. He could not turn away, could not stop the vision. He floated over the field, and the cruel acts multiplied everywhere he looked. "Renounce your Wood!" the Masters commanded those who had thrown down their weapons. Those who refused paid dearly. Here a group of blue-skinned Masters stretched a man out on the ground, and killed him with swords while he screamed and struggled. There the lords of Thane were hacked to death by slaves of the Masters, their heads and limbs separated from their bodies and heaped by the river.

The blind king of Thane, Carrillon, whose advisors described the battle to him, whose position on a hill-top behind his army was the last surrounded and captured when he himself refused to run, was now set upon by his captors. He would not renounce the Wood. They stripped him of his crown and garments, and on the field beheaded him under the watchful eye of the sun itself. And God, the priest reminded himself, his mind reeling with the horror of the sight. The light of day shone on these acts: this was God's light as the Hyacinth taught.

Why did we not know?

And the priest floated in the air as no man had, and he witnessed the worst of all days. The Masters walked the earth over the bodies of Thanian men. They offered freedom in return for renouncing the Wood and taking up the True Belief. Those who agreed became their accomplices. They defiled their comrades and took their heads, and they forced them to parade in the shorn skins of their brothers. The Masters forced one man to murder another, and forced then another to gut the killer. Then all were set upon by the Masters themselves and their slaves, and tortured and their throats were cut from ear to ear. The dying were numberless on the field. The new converts cried, their bloody hands soaked too with tears.

Where was God's light now?

The priest cried out, floating on the air, his arms and legs useless instruments. He looked to God in heaven and cursed his own fate: to witness these acts and be powerless, to be weak.

He had always been weak, and had always borne it as a given. He had shunned the stronger brothers and kept to himself, in the library, in the monastic towers that overlooked the dusty Thanian capital at Riadom. All the flesh and its horrors he had kept far from himself, and here were the worst crimes committed right before him. He did not know them by name, the victims, but they were men like himself, and boys, whose families and blood were like his own. Thanian. Of this land. Conquered and enslaved.

Or killed, as all these men were when they refused to renounce the Wood. All of them. Slowly and with a murderous joy, with a parading power and perverse crimes. The captured Thanians saw this, and their fates were sealed.

The priest saw this, and he saw more. He saw an injured Thanian man looking directly at him as he awaited the attention of his captors. The man sat in an open space with hundreds of others, his bloody tunic hanging from his body, and his eyes dead and knowing. He stared up into the air at the priest, and he was not the only one. Others among the Thanians looked to him. And they called out: "See what these devils do to us! Do you? They will kill us all!"

He could say nothing. The doomed men called to him. "Tell the world what they do to us! Tell the people how we died at Coormo!"

Devils took note of his presence, and they gathered below him. The priest wanted to give the Thanian men a message, but his voice was clogged with horror. He could only look at them and know their fate, and his mouth moved but he could say nothing. Then the daylight began to fade around him and he knew that the vision was coming to an end. He was being taken away, and his message went with him. Even as they faded from his vision he tried to tell them.

I am your witness.

I shall be your voice.

* * *

It was night again, in a dark clearing in the strange northern lands, and the priest's body thrummed with pain. He lay on the grass in the center of the Wheel, rolling his head from right to left and crying out uncontrollably. He lifted his hands up to his hand, huge bearlike things that they had become, pulsing and stinging with pain, and growing more. He smashed a fist down on the ground beside him.

Coormo. The word had been an obscene whisper among the students. None knew its meaning.

Until now.

His eyes throbbed, but he opened them. His hands stung, but he put them down on the grass to balance himself. His legs similarly throbbed, having become very much like the trunks of trees, and his ribs and guts ached and burned, but he pulled himself up to a sitting position there in the night, and his head spun but he tried to think.

Think!

He could scarcely create a sensible train of words in his head. When the dawn came he knew that he had changed forever. So alone. Solitary in his knowledge, in what he had seen, in his pain. He sat in the clearing and he knew that he could not ever rest. He got to his feet and gathered up the clothes that he had worn. They were ripped and shredded, and he wrapped the remains of his priestly robes around himself as a loincloth. His huge hands were difficult to manipulate, but he tied the ends into a knot.

His body still hurt, but not with anywhere near the intensity that of the pain that had gone on before, during the visions, while he grew. He now stood several heads taller than he had ever been. He looked down at his body. Muscles rippled beneath his skin, and his arms and legs seemed to fill with vitality and power. And rage. He could not shake from his mind the pictures of what he had seen. What shame in defeat, what shame. But the shame of that was dwarfed by the treachery of the lords and the Church. He had never suspected the magnitude of the lie, or his own involvement, his own betrayal...

The Masters had not come bearing wisdom, but had instead inflicted unspeakable cruelty. Thanians had not gathered to the True Belief. Not as the Church taught. He had seen them. He knew. He knew the truth.

The rage, the fury. The pain he had seen. It could not be contained. He shook his fists and his huge legs carried him into the center of the clearing. He did not look or care where he walked, he thought only of the poor victims, the shame, the shame. He waved his arms around and lost his balance on the new feet. He fell down to the grass and beat it with his fist. Again and again, slamming it into the cold dirt, pounding the grass down, making a hole in the black earth, a place to put his rage.

"Whore's sons! You used me! You lied to me! Ah God help me! You lied! You lied!"

His charges degenerated from words to a long dark howl. He beat the earth with his fist, beat it and beat it and beat it. He beat it down. He would do the same to them. He would beat them down. He alone had seen the truth. He who had been Tare, whose identity had been given by the false Church, and who had given himself to it in turn. He would throw that name away.

The Old Belief was not just a forest heresy. No, the Wood had power. It had selected him and shown him these things. It had made him the witness at Coormo. Once it had reigned across all of Thane. The Masters and the Church had destroyed it with the cruelest of means. But now! Now there would be a reckoning.

Now the Wood had awoken. Its power needed no proof.

He would serve the Wood as a warrior.

In the darkest hours of the night, he sat quietly in the clearing. Clarity. This he sought and it came to him. He would no longer be Tare, for that was a slave's name. He was a free man, and alone. He chose a name that marked him uniquely: The Witness. It fitted him now, and he would die with it.