Free The Cellar Beneath the Cellar (Bell Mountain) by Lee Duigon Page B

no action forthcoming from the mardar, Sharak and Hooq returned to their scouting duties in the mountains. The Abnak surprised Obst with the friendliness of his farewell.
    “I hope we meet again, old man,” Hooq said. “I’m sorry I wanted to kill you on the spot, when first we met; I suppose it must be a bad habit. But you’re as daft as a loon and as brave as a blackfly—just the kind of fellow we Abnaks like best. Just try not to fall afoul of the mardar!”
    “What do you think they’re going to do with me?” Obst asked Ryons, after Hooq left. “I’m beginning to think the mardar has forgotten me.”
    “You’d better hope he has,” the boy said. “What he usually does to prisoners is to cut them open and read the future from their entrails. They’re alive when he does it, tied down to the altar. He watches the way they squirm: that’s supposed to tell him things about the future, too.”
    Which delivered Obst right to the doorstep of his dilemma—when was he to start preaching God’s word to these people? And what would they do to him when he tried?
    He knew the history of the prophets. Sychas the Mighty One, in his bearskin cloak, was a terror to the corrupt kings of ancient Obann, doing miracles by the power of God. Zaydabara, old and widowed, unable to walk without a cane: she never raised her voice, and yet her words called a nation to repentance. And there was Ika, himself of royal blood, who came out of his house unscathed after wicked King Meen’s men burned it to the ground. These were God’s servants, Obst reflected, and their Lord protected them.
    But the Old Books of Scripture made mention of many other prophets who had not fared so well: prophets stoned to death by angry mobs, murdered by tyrants, or devoured by wild beasts let loose against them. Presumably their faithful souls had places reserved for them in Heaven. But the simple truth was, a prophet never knew if God was going to protect him in the flesh or not. As Prophet Menkawr said, when they were about to cut him down with swords, “At least I have obeyed my God.”
    “And where,” Obst asked himself, “is my prophetic calling? How do I know God has really chosen me? It might be all my own imagination, after all.”
    “Eh?” said Ryons.
    Obst startled. He’d forgotten he was not alone. Indeed, they were standing now beside the stream where Ryons went for water, and Obst could not remember walking there.
    “Sorry, Ryons! I must have been talking to myself.”
    “What’s all this about prophets and kings and some great god?”
    Obst sighed. “Oh, I’ve been grappling with my cowardice. Of course God has sent me here to preach His word among the Heathen. Why else would He have given me the miraculous gift of understanding and speaking all the Heathen languages? It’s just that when you got to talking about the mardar and telling me the things he does to people … I was afraid.”
    “Everyone’s afraid of the mardar,” Ryons said. “And everyone should be.”
    “So I’ve been hemming and hawing, and not getting started, and pretending I didn’t know for sure what God wants me to do, just because I’m afraid. I wasn’t afraid when Hooq and Sharak captured me, and I wasn’t afraid when they brought me before the mardar. But now I am! Isn’t that strange?”
    He saw by the expression on Ryons’ face that the boy was truly worried about him—this slave, who in all his life had probably never had the luxury of worrying about another human being because there was no one in the world who ever spared a thought for him. “Is that why I’m losing my courage?” Obst wondered. Was his love for this child reattaching him to this poor, doomed world? Had life suddenly become so sweet that he was afraid to part with it?
    “Don’t be afraid,” Ryons said. “I’ll keep you out of the mardar’s way, and out of mind. The host is going to cross the mountains very soon: everybody’s saying so. The chiefs are all as busy