He told her about the god-pipe. He showed it to her and gave her the
tales of its singing. "You feel your flesh shiver and your bones begin
to crumble, rocks dance and mountains groan and the gates of hell open
before you but now the pipes are forever silent, Sathi. No man knows
how to play them."
"I heard of your music at that battle," she nodded gravely, "and
wondered why it was not sounded again this time." Awe and fear were in
her eyes, the hand that touched the scarred sack trembled a little.
"And this is the pipe of Killorn! You cannot play it again? You cannot
find out how? It would be the saving of Ryvan and of your own folk and
perhaps of all the Twilight Lands, Kery."
"I know. But what can I do? Who can understand the powers of heaven or
unlock the doors of hell save Llugan Longsword himself?"
"I do not know. But Kery--I wonder. This pipe.... Do you really think
that gods and not men wrought it?"
"Who but a god could make such a thing, Sathi?"
"I do not know, I say. And yet--Tell me, have you any idea of what the
world is like in Killorn? Do you think it a flat plain with the sun
hanging above, forever fixed in one spot?"
"Why I suppose so. Though we have met men in the southlands who claimed
the world was a round ball and went about the sun in such a manner as
always to turn the same face to it."
"Yes, the wise men of Ryvan tell us that that must be the case. They
have learned it by studying the fixed stars and those which wander.
Those others are worlds like our own, they say, and the fixed stars
are suns a very long ways off. And we have a very dim legend of a time
once, long and long and long ago, when this world did not eternally
face the sun either. It spun like a top so that each side of it had
light and dark alternately."
Kery knitted his brows trying to see that for himself. At last he
nodded. "Well, it may have been. What of it?"
"The barbarians all think the world was born in flame and thunder many
ages ago. But some of our thinkers believe that this creation was a
catastrophe which destroyed that older world I speak of. There are dim
legends and here and there we find very ancient ruins, cities greater
than any we know today but buried and broken so long ago that even
their building stones are almost weathered away. These thinkers believe
that man grew mighty on this forgotten world which spun about itself,
that his powers were like those we today call divine.
"Then something happened. We cannot imagine what, though a wise man
once told me he believed all things attract each other--that is the
reason why they fall to the ground he said--and that another world
swept so close to ours that its pull stopped the spinning and yanked
the moon closer than it had been."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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