Chapter 14 — Making Decisions and Spreading Rumors

IF YOU’RE NEW HERE, YOU ARE LATE TO THE SAGA OF A TALE OF TWO TIMES. WE ARE SOON ENDING THE 9TH AND FINAL VOLUME OF THE NARRATIVE, WHICH WILL WRAP UP IN THIS POSTED FORMAT ON GOOD FRIDAY OF THIS LENTEN SEASON.

TO START READING AT THE BEGINNING, THE FIRST VOLUME, THE MENACE OF THE ANCIENT FOE, CAN BE FOUND BY CLICKING THE BUTTON:

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~ 1 ~ “Do you know, Fr. Rolf, that Ricardo has increased my longevity in the same way that Thiuderieks had increased Thersa’s longevity?”

The poor old man is repeating himself; he is truly aged now. “No, Fr. Sigurd; tell me about it.”

Fr. Rolf Wooden was sitting at the death bed of Fr. Sigurd Krull, who was the world’s oldest living man. Rolf had been told by Sigurd himself that Sigurd’s death was imminent—that he would die in the place where he now lay, in his cell in the small “monastery of two”. The monastery, with its Our Lady of the Andes Chapel, was located in the village near the small Clan Hold high in the Chilean Andes. Fr. Rolf, who was a very old man himself, had, at Fr. Sigurd’s request, administered to him the last rites. (Fr. Rolf Wooden was unusually hale for his age, and Fr. Sigurd had failed to make that point clear to him.) Sigurd had said, “I have buried Theodore and Betty Adler; now I, too, must pass, Rolf.”

His mind is wandering. “They were fine people.”

“Rolf, you have heard the confessions of their children, but you have never heard theirs.”

“That is true, Fr. Sigurd.”

“Then I will tell you, Rolf, that Betty and Theodore truly are Thersa and Thiuderieks. I know, of course, that you think now that I am delirious.” Fr. Sigurd turned his gaze to the crucifix on the wall beyond the foot of his bed. “You have been hearing the confessions of Victoria, the daughter of Anna and Antonio Marquez. Now you will hear the confessions of Anna and Antonio, learning from them that I am not delirious.”

Rolf knew perfectly well that Anna and Antonio were truly Rhoda and Ricardo. For the past decade or more, life had been very interesting for him, and his journals were filled with his interviews with those four whose identities had been hidden. But recently Fr. Sigurd had come to believe that their true identities were known only to himself.

Smiling contentedly at Rolf, Fr. Sigurd said, “Now I am ready to go. Father, kindly say the prayer of departure for me—in Latin, for old times’ sake.”

Fr. Sigurd returned his gaze to the crucifix, and Fr. Rolf began, “Comméndo te omnipoténti Deo, caríssime frater…”

Fr. Sigurd passed away while Rolf was reciting the rite of passage, and Rolf sat then, for a long time, beside the body of his mentor. He shed many tears for the man who had passed—like Sigurd’s own mentor, Gertrude Kaster—in the Death of Sleep. He thought about the account in Ottilie Kruger’s journal which Fr. Sigurd had shown to him:

After Gertrude Kaster had walked into her cottage, on a day more than a century in the past, she had failed to find the manuscript of the Old Goth Touchstone which she had expected to find waiting for her. At once she had known that she had utterly failed, for her new friends—who had promised her so much for the Old Goth Touchstone—would forsake her. Then, her previous sale of the New Goth Touchstone would be found out, and she would have no place in the Clan, either. Gertrude had been moved at first to anger. Anger had been followed by grief, and then by a moment of repentance in which the Heart Shield had offered her the Death of Sleep.

These things had been told to Ottilie by the Heart Shield. Perhaps the god had known that Gertrude’s repentance would be brief, so that the Death of Sleep was a mercy. The knowledge had lightened the burden of Fr. Sigurd’s great longevity, for Gertrude had been dearer to him than was his own mother.

~ 2 ~ “Hans honey, Thiuderieks and Thersa have died, within a day of each other. May God have mercy!”

“Amen! Yohanna, why is it that you’ve called me ‘honey’ after all these years?”

“Can you not guess why, after all of these years?”

“Is it because you’ve remembered Rhoda? But I’m sure you think about her every day.”

“That is true, my Hans. Look; there is the bicycle courier coming over the far rise, with the same news.”

The two Heads of the Clan, both now more than ninety years of age, were sitting on their private veranda overlooking the Guild’s coconut plantation in Sri Lanka. Yohanna rose from her chair as a light, sweet breeze stirred, and a melodious bell rang out over the sprawling collection of buildings among the coconut palms, indicating that the bicycle courier had entered through the first tectonic offset. The signal bell announced that the courier was bearing important and secret news for the Heads’ ears only.

Yohanna picked up Thiuderieks's staff, given to her by Rhoda seventy years earlier on their expedition to Thiuderieks’s Garth. There, Yohanna had watched Rhoda dismiss the Penultimate Shift, which had delved for nearly five-thousand years. Relative to Yohanna’s present, that Shift had ended three thousand years ago. Sometimes I feel my full eight-thousand ninety-five years. Oh Rhoda, Rhoda, you crafty lady! Today, you have make me feel twenty-five! Holding the staff with one hand, Yohanna took Hans’s hand with the other and ceremoniously helped him to rise. Hans was not in need of her aid—not quite yet anyway—but through their contact with her staff, she was able to bring them into the offset domain which had been entered by the Courier. The bell had informed the household staff that they would not find the Heads on the veranda where they had left them.

As they wrapped their thin old arms around each other, Hans whispered into Yohanna’s ear (although there was no one near to overhear), “I know you called me ‘honey’ because Rhoda’s Living memory has come back to you. They’re alive, just as I had thought!” And planned for.

“Hans dear, you are so sharp, it is truly right that you are a Clan Head.” She handed to Hans his cane, which had become lately a sign of office like her staff. It had been resting against the small table next to his chair while they had been editing their journals—at their First Scribe’s insistence. “I am recalling, my Hans, what it is that Rhoda said to me when she gave me my staff on Thiuderieks’s Garth. She said, ‘Here, Yohanna; this is a token of me for your old age.’ Her words chilled me then, with the thought that she was foreseeing her death. Now I suspect that she was jesting, unknowingly foreshadowing this very moment. I know now that she and Ricardo have been sleeping as Thiuderieks had done, but for far fewer years than his eight-thousand!”

“Then, they could be our children!”

“They are younger than our youngest. Hans, they have been awake for longer than a decade without our learning of it!” Yohanna saw that Hans did not look surprised. Men and their secrets!

The young female courier dismounted from her bicycle and strode briskly up to the veranda. After greeting them, she immediately informed Yohanna and Hans of the passing of Thiuderieks and Thersa, both on the same recent day, in the Clan Hold in the Andes. There, ancient Fr. Sigurd, served by Fr. Rolf Wooden, had presided at a small funeral mass attended by their immediate household family. Fr. Sigurd had passed not many days later. No one outside the family, other than Hans and Yohanna, had yet been informed of their passing.

The courier, Thersa Rose, was the granddaughter of Thersa and Thiuderieks, who had raised their family of five in utmost seclusion in that small Guild Hold in the Chilean Andes which was unknown to nearly all others of the Clan.

Earlier on this day, Yohanna had received, like a bolt from the blue, a Strand of Rhoda’s Living Memory. In Rhoda’s voice, it had told her of the deaths of Thersa and Thiuderieks. Yohanna now thought it likely that the Andean Hold of which they has just heard, was the place in which Ricardo and Rhoda had awakened and had dwelt. “You and Hans must live a few years longer,” Rhoda’s voice in the Strand had said, “if we are to meet again in the flesh. Yohanna, I hope that meeting happens in the next Festive Council, which may be at Quinceañera Beach. Dear Sister, I have seen photographs of your children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They are lovely! You can see my children today through my sight: Victoria, Miguel and little Manuel. The boys are so near in age that once they would have been called ‘Irish twins’. I don’t know how that happened—well, I do know. Anyway, right now they are very adorable.” That, in addition to Rhoda’s account of the deaths of Thiuderieks and Thersa, was the content of the Strand. In it, Yohanna had seen, through Rhoda’s eyes, that Ricardo was in his thirties, and that his physique was that of a man who does physical work. She had seen Victoria, their eldest child, sitting on the other side of the room, busy with some handiwork. Appearing to be about twelve years old, and in the process of becoming a strikingly beautiful young woman, Victoria had been clearly a happy child of Ricardo and Rhoda. Although Rhoda had been speaking softly for the Strand, in order to avoid being overheard, a momentary flash of Victoria’s eyes away from her work, had told Yohanna that she was, in fact, listening intently to her mother’s voice. Yohanna had smiled to herself. Like her Mother. Through Rhoda’s peripheral vision, Yohanna had discerned a window revealing snowy mountains outside the room in which the family were gathered.

~ 3 ~ Hans and Yohanna insisted that the courier, Thersa Rose, share in their business lunch with the dozen ranking Clan members who had come to the Guild Plantation to plan the next Festive Council. Thersa Rose would be returning soon by air to Valparaiso, Chile, from which she would fly to the Andes Hold, which was one of the smallest and most insignificant Holds in the Guild.

At lunch, Thersa Rose carefully avoided any reference to Rhoda and Ricardo, but she did, at Yohanna’s request, describe the inhabitants of the Andean Hold. Among these were Anna and Antonio Marquez, the Hold’s mechanics, and Thersa Rose talked with Yohanna for several minutes about their family. The Marquez children, as described by Thersa Rose, were exactly like the children of Rhoda and Ricardo which Yohanna had seen in Rhoda’s Strand of Living Memory. The Marquez couple had been Hold dwellers for a little longer than a decade, according to Thersa Rose.

The conversation moved on to other families dwelling in the Hold, and to other matters. Most of the other Clan members at the lunch assumed that the Clan’s World Heads were merely being polite by inquiring about the courier’s humble home Hold. They thought that whatever message had been brought by her from the South American Guild, would not concern that small tourist stop and air taxi service center in the high Andes. Most Clan members believed that Hold to be maintained only for Guild document storage in the cold dry air.

“You may spread the rumor, Thersa Rose, that Hans and I will soon retire, and that we will call for a Head Thing to elect a new World Head. The new Head certainly need not be another co-Headship like ours.”

“I have heard,” said Thersa Rose, “that the second co-Headship was necessary for prolonging the Ancient Foe’s uncertainty about the Headship’s identity.”

“Yes; Hans and I do sow confusion at times.”

“Maybe we should have named one of our children Uncertainty.” Hans’s remark drew chuckles from others at the table. Thersa Rose smiled at Yohanna, who knew that she could have learned this fact about the second co-Headship only from Rhoda or Ricardo. In this way, Thersa Rose had adroitly confirmed that Rhoda and Ricardo had been with them in Chile for over a decade.

The others at the table heard only that a Head Thing would soon be held, and that they were authorized to spread the rumor about it. They began a discussion of ways to make this rumor as firm as possible. These high-ranking Clan members had gathered earlier at the Guild Plantation to socialize and to begin planning for the next Festive Council—the Seventh, counting from the first Festive Council held in Europe under the Clan revival of Fr. Sigurd, of blessed memory. Sigurd was believed to have died more than a half-century ago, as a member of Ottilie Krüger’s War Thing.

Everyone knew that Ottilie Krüger and Martin Knox had met as children at the First Festive Council, and that at the Second Festive Council, the first Sign of a new War Thing had been given to those two young people in the presence of Fr. Sigurd. (Generally passed over was the fact that he had bungled the affair.) Ottilie’s War Thing and the one soon succeeding it, under Rhoda Knox and Ricardo Chavez, were now popularly regarded as “the War Thing of three Heads”. Thiuderieks was said to have awakened during that War Thing; then he had, in the embrace of his bride who had awakened him, passed from Earth’s Province—after waiting eight-thousand years for their reunion. It seemed an unlikely romantic story, and more unlikely because of the the bride’s identification with the Countess Thersa of Greystone Castle in old Germany. Swiss police records showed clearly that the Countess had perished in an automobile accident decades earlier. More fantastic however, than the story of Thersa and Thiuderieks, was the fact that Most Scribes begrudgingly agreed that a Commons existed in which a Watch was kept on Thiuderieks’s Garth by the secretive Delvers’ Thing.

Yohanna and Hans were the only living persons—other than members of the Delvers’ Thing—who were known to have visited Thiuderieks’s Garth. And because both of them refused to publicly discuss the matter, no more would be learned about it until after they had died and their journals had been released for incorporation into the Histories. The Histories had not been updated since the days of Ottilie’s War Thing, but that was nothing new, as the descendants of Valkei had delayed the release of her journals for nearly three centuries. But, as “the three Heads” had produced no other descendants, the wait was not expected to be nearly so long as that. And Yohanna and Hans were believed to have few Secrets, having been involved only in a minor matter in the War Thing having to do with suppressing the black market in nuclear weapons. Thersa Rose’s comment about Hans and Yohanna having a continuing role in confusing the Ancient Foe had raised only one eyebrow.

That eyebrow belonged to Alfred Mendoza, an elder from New Home Ranch in Argentina, who knew that Thiuderieks and Thersa had long dwelt in the remote and well-concealed Chilean Hold. Because Alfred was the son of Diego Mendoza and Isabel Tavares, who had for many decades been the Heads of the South American Guild, he knew that his parents’ headship, like that of Hans and Yohanna, was part of the continuing confusion of the Foe over the identity of the Clan’s leadership. Alfred’s parents had, after all, played a part in the fall of the spent Soma into the Darkling Deeps, and the icy sealing of its waters.

No one, not even Alfred, knew of the events which had taken place before his parents had been able to get to the Horn Room of the Bleak Berm: They and their guides—Denizen Manuel Knox, and Indigo Moore—had been attacked by the Foe’s panther Animas, and Yohanna had come to their defense, wielding her staff as a weapon. With Indigo and Manuel acting as their rear guard, Yohanna had enabled Diego and Isabel to arrive at their station in the Horn Room in time. In the encounter, Manuel had passed from the Commons, and mortally wounded Indigo had passed with him. It was not known where and how Rhoda and Ricardo had routed the Ancient Foe from Earth’s Province, but certainly they had perished in the battle.

Alfred Mendoza knew that the day’s unexpected guest of honor, the young and attractive single woman Thersa Rose Adler, was a descendant of Thiuderieks and Thersa, who had adopted the surname Adler from the family of Reyna Schroeder’s First Scribe, Betsy. Alfred knew this because he himself had developed the fictitious genealogical chronology of the Adlers from the English Guild's Chronicles. (The invented Adler line begins before World War Two with the fictitious male offspring of Laura Payne and Walter Knox.) The truth was, of course, recorded in the Word Wise Secrets, which could be read only by the eldest Word Wise First Scribe, who was Alfred himself. He guessed that Thersa Rose had come to bring tidings of the death of her grandfather Thiuderieks, who was the true founder of the Clan. Alfred knew that although most people of ancient Clan lineage imagined themselves to be descended from Thiuderieks, at this table only Thersa Rose was truly descended from him. Those with the most nearly valid claims to descending from such remote African ancestors were actually descended from the large family of Thorismund and Ingundis the Fair, who were Thiuderieks's apprentices.

Alfred smiled as Yohanna steered the conversation around to a consideration of the location at which the Head Thing should be held, by asking Thersa Rose’s opinion.

“Why not Europe?” Thersa Rose suggested. “They’ve been out of the picture for ages.”

To no one’s surprise, Hans—the only European-born person in the room—seconded the motion. No one wished to gainsay the old man today; anyway this was only informal table talk. Some of them realized quickly, however, that locating the Head Thing in Europe was a sagacious suggestion, for no major candidate for Clan Headship was located there.

To Alfred, it occurred also that a European location would be far from places where rumors of Thiuderieks's fate might be encountered. The existence of Thiuderieks in Earth’s Province was a Secret, as would be his death. Alfred said, “Miss Adler’s very good idea should be given serious consideration.”

Several nodded their heads in agreement, and a Head thing to be held in Europe became part of the rumor of the impending resignations of Hans and Yohanna.

Rhoda Su Ling, the middle-aged granddaughter of the Chinese Guild’s fabled Lisa Su, approved of Europe as the Head Thing’s location. She would not be honor-bound, in that case, to squabble with the Africans about its location because of both Guilds having current frontrunners for the position of next Head of the Clan. Rhoda Su signaled her approval of locating the Head Thing in Europe, by raising the subject of the Festive Council’s planning. Then Matthew—the highest-ranking African after Yohanna, and descended from Aretta’s Scribe, Matthew—followed suit by nodding at Rhoda Su and asking Thersa Rose, “What location, my dear, would you recommend for the Festive Council?”

“Oh, not Chile! It’s too cold where we are. I suggest a warm place such as the Guild’s Quinceañera Beach in Mexico. I’ve heard that it’s a very family-friendly resort.”