It was a few weeks later, and while Tash went further afield hunting, Josie was by the stream making an effort to befriend the dog who behaved so curiously unlike the other wild dogs of Telmar. It had at last come close enough for her to pet it. It was not a well-groomed animal, like the house dogs at home, and it had the coarse long hair of an outside dog at the end of a cold winter, but it did not seem to be ill-fed or ill, nor like the wild beasts in the fables that come up to young ladies to have thorns removed from their paws. No, it seemed to be genuinely seeking out Josie’s company, and as if it had something to say. It was nervous even after coming up to Josie, perking to attention at every little sound in the forest and once or twice darting away from Josie and needing to be coaxed back. After she had sat for a time talking to the dog and stroking it, and her feet were starting to feel the chill, Josie hit upon an idea.
‘I think you can understand what I say, dog,’ she told the dog. ‘If you can understand what I say, lick my hand.’
The dog licked her hand.
‘Do you think you could you lick my hand to mean ‘yes’, and not lick my hand to mean ‘no’?’
The dog licked Josie’s hand again.
‘Oh, good dog,’ she said. Though dogs do just lick people’s hands out of friendliness, I suppose, she thought. She asked the dog a few questions to test it. ‘Am I a gazelle?’ The dog left her hand alone.
‘Am I a dog?’ No.
‘Am I a human?’ Yes.
Josie scratched the dog behind the ears, and began to ask it questions in earnest.
‘Do you need our help?’ Yes. ‘Do you need us to help change you into a person?’ No. ‘Do you- do you need us to help you find something?’ A long pause, and then a yes. ‘Do you need us to help you find something- somewhere else?’ Another long pause and finally a yes. Josie wondered what made these uncertain questions, and thought for a while. The sound of the stream was a calming one, but somehow made it hard to think. ‘Do you need us to find someone outside the valley?’ A very definite lick. ‘Will you come into the castle with us? We have roast pork.’ The dog hesitated.
There was a crackling of branches, and the dog darted away from Josie. She could hear Tash’s heavy footsteps, and as he drew nearer smell the heady stink of newly gutted boar. The dog slunk further away, and she could no longer hear its footsteps clearly.
‘Hush, Tash, you’re scaring the dog away,’ she said, in a tone of mild reproach. She could tell that Tash was suspicious of the dog- it was hardly surprising, from Tash’s story, that he should be suspicious of most everything- but she wished he would be a little more friendly towards it. Dogs could tell when people didn’t like them, she knew.
‘I am very sorry,’ said Tash. ‘Would it like a bit of pig?’ Josie heard Tash rend a gobbet of flesh from the boar’s inside and toss it into the bush where the dog was lurking.
‘It doesn’t seem to be coming back,’ said Josie, after they had stood listening to the bush expectantly for quite some time. ‘Oh well. I expect it will be back later. I am quite certain it is a talking dog that doesn’t talk, Tash. It answered my questions, and I figured out that it wants us to help it meet someone somewhere.’
‘That is a beginning,’ said Tash. ‘Do you want me to carry you back?’
‘No, thank you,’ said Josie. ‘You carry the pig, and I will follow. I do sort of know the way.’
She stood up and wiggled her cold toes to try and get the feeling back into them, then walked with Tash back to the hidden door in the cliff and the shadowed stairs that led onto the grounds of the castle, telling him as they walked of what the dog had told her.
‘There are bad dogs, and there are good dogs, Tash,’ she told him. ‘I am quite sure that this one is a good dog, whatever else it may be.’
***
That night the moon was full, and Tash was restless. He did not like sleeping alone, and found it more difficult to avoid unpleasant thoughts. He had seen something that day, while he was out hunting, that troubled him, and that he had not wanted to speak of to Josie. He had seen its tracks in the earth, first: great paw prints, many times larger than the paws of the dogs. Then he had seen the beast itself, on the other side of the stream from him, atop a boulder so that its feet were higher than Tash’s head. It had not made any sound that could be heard above the chattering of the stream: but it had looked at Tash, and he had known it was a talking beast, and a creature of power. He was sure it was the sort of creature called a lion, the sort whose stone head the statue of the Queen held, and he was sure it had wanted to speak to him: but he had turned and walked quickly away in the other direction before it could say anything.
Eventually Tash gave up and went quietly out of the rooms he shared with Josie to go exploring. He prowled about the inside hallways for a time, but he knew them all well, and found nothing new to explore, so he then ventured outside. He went from one garden courtyard to another, feeling just as restless as he had lying on the floor trying to sleep, and then further afield, to one of the ruined parts of the castle of Telmar he had had not gotten around to exploring before. Most of the walls there were only piles of rubble, covered with masses of dead thistles left over from the summer before. It smelled, Tash realised, a very little like the world of the thalarka – which was probably another reason he had not explored it before. Unlike Josie, he had not yet been homesick in the slightest.
Beyond one of the shapeless mounds of rubble, Tash was surprised to find a ring of reasonably intact walls, and in one of these walls he found a door that was even less ruined by time. It hung true, and was not cracked or weathered, and seemed to Tash almost as well-preserved as the things in the hidden room beneath the evil magician’s bedroom. ‘There are probably more useful magic things behind it,’ he said, finding the thought cheering. With an effort, he reminded himself that there could well be dangers behind it as well.
The door was of wood, but wood that was so dark and fine-grained and obviously heavy that it might as well have been iron. Tash pushed it without really expecting it to open; but it swung open readily. Beyond the door was a roofless gallery. At one side tall windows let in more moonlight, while the other was cut into the side of the hill, with a great archway leading into it like a hungry mouth. It was wide enough and tall enough to accommodate a giant many times Tash’s height.
Tash had taken a lamp with him in case he found anything he wanted to look at more closely, and though he had not yet had great luck either at lighting them or at keeping them lit, this time a tiny flicker of yellow fire had survived while he carried the lamp about the ruins, and it sprang helpfully into full brightness when he fiddled with it. ‘I will just have a look, and if there is anything interesting, I can come back with Josie in the morning,’ Tash said to himself.
Tash had not taken very many steps down the tunnel before he had the oddest feeling that it was a thing that went on forever, with no beginning and no end. The air smelt strange and felt thin, as if it was missing something important that air was supposed to have. Tash found himself labouring over each breath as if he had been running. An odd whispering sound echoed around him, a sound like people hiding in darkened corners telling each other secrets in a language he did not understand.
The light of the lamp went only a short way into the darkness. Like the darkness below the Procurator’s Tower, it seemed not so much the absence of light as the active exclusion of light. Thus when Tash came to the door in the side of the tunnel, he did not see it until it was unexpectedly and uncomfortably close. This door was different from the other doors in the castle of Telmar, disappearing into the darkness above Tash, but its handle was only a little higher than would be convenient for someone Josie’s size. It was of some polished wood that still gleamed even after standing underground for who knows how many years, and on it someone had made a complicated picture out of countless little pieces of stone.
The picture was of a tall, white figure which was either wearing a floor-length robe or had no legs. Tash was not sure which. He also could not tell if the long drooping protuberances on its head were part of it, or meant to be some sort of hat. It was the figure’s expression that made him feel most uneasy: feet or not, and hat or not, it looked like the sort of person who would consider Tash even less than useless; who would not notice him, even if Tash brought it splendid gifts, or fought fearful enemies for it. Tash shivered under the pressure of the arrogant eyes of the picture, and hastily moved on without trying the handle.
Each doorway Tash passed – and he passed many of them, until he lost count – had a picture like this with a different figure displayed in it. Though they varied a great deal, none of them seemed to be the sort of people who would pay the slightest bit of attention to Tash. Tash decided that the things on their heads had to be hats. He moved uneasily past these unpleasant figures, accompanied only by the echoed shufflings of his own feet.
His lamp seemed to be more effectively piercing the gloom, and Tash caught sight of a door a little way ahead that stood partly open. Without meaning to, Tash began to walk more slowly. He had been hurried along by the unpleasant pictures on the doors, and only just realised how far he had come underground and how much trouble he could be in if things went wrong. ‘I hope there isn’t one of those legless hat-wearing people inside,’ Tash told himself.
When he came to the open door, Tash saw at once that it was different from all the others that he had passed thus far. The front was blank, with no picture, and Tash had the impression that this room was waiting for someone. The long hallway with the doors coming off it had very much the feel of an immense tomb, like the ones the Procurators of the Overlord were supposed to be buried in, so maybe it was that a hat-wearing figure was meant to be buried here, and had not yet died when Telmar came to end. ‘Though they do not look very much like the men of Telmar,’ he said to himself.
Cautiously, Tash peered around the door, and was relieved to see that the room inside was empty. It was not large, and was furnished with a table and chair made in the same way as the furniture in the intact parts of the castle. Though very large compared to the furniture elsewhere in the castle, the table and chair were only a little too high to be comfortable for Tash. On the table lay two immense books.
There were grand symbols in gold on the cover of the first book, like strange insects that had crawled on it and been squashed there. As Tash looked at them, they seemed to writhe around like the geometric theorems he had seen carved in stone in the world of the almost-thalarka. Suddenly, with a wrenching sensation inside a little like the feeling of falling between worlds, he found that he could read them.
He froze still in astonishment.
‘The Book of Tash,’ said Tash aloud in wonder, and his words echoed about the chamber like his footsteps had in the hallway outside, repeating over and over. ‘Tash…ash….ash…ash….shh….sh…’
He craned his neck over to look at the cover of the other book. This one had symbols like astrological diagrams worked on it in red and black gems, and as he looked at them they too twisted in his mind to become words he could understand. They read the same: The Book of Tash.
It had to be some other Tash, Tash thought, for it was impossible that someone had written not one, but two books about him. Perhaps Tash was a name the men of Telmar had used. Then it struck him that these might be magical books, and therefore very dangerous, like most magical things. It could surely do no good at all to open the covers to see what was written inside. ‘I should go back to Josie, and we can come back together and have a look if she thinks it is a good idea,’ Tash told himself. ‘Yes.’ But he stayed standing by the table, and did not go back out the open door.
The problem was that Tash very much wanted to see what was in the book, so he could assure himself that it really was not written about him. So he did what Josie or I would have done if we were in his position – and which you would probably not have done, being in all likelihood more level-headed. Tash reached out with both hands to turn back the front cover of the first book to see what was written inside. Like the words on the cover, the words within began as a chaos of fragmented shapes, but as Tash watched them they writhed into forms that Tash could understand.
‘Know then, O seeker after enlightenment, that Tash was told always that his uselessness was of a kind utter and complete,’ read Tash. ‘In a voice enlightened and gleaming with accuracy, the father of Tash would pronounce his uselessness perfect in its completeness, and to this assertion his brothers and sisters and mothers would voice agreement after the manner of their kind. Then lowly Tash would bow his head, and accede humbly to the pronouncement of his betters.’
A chill crept over Tash, and his skin itched with the dryness of the air. This was a strange and a strong magic indeed.
‘I should go back to Josie,’ he told himself. But despite this, he read to the end of the page, and then the next, and the next. He had seen strange and strong magic before: magic that had thrown him from world to world, and turned him to stone, and this book did not seem like it could possibly be as dreadful as those magics. Besides, it was very interesting to read his story all written out in words. It somehow seemed grander and more exciting, and Tash himself more heroic and clever than he had felt while he was actually doing all those things.
Tash had expected that when he got up to the part in the story where he was sitting and reading the magical book, it would stop and he would not learn anything about what happened next. The other possibility that had occurred to him was that it might repeat over and over, a book within a book, and then another book within that one, so that unless he was careful he would be trapped reading his own story forever. Neither of these things happened. The story went on. Page after page after page, relentlessly recounting all the things that would happen to Tash after he had read this book.
‘No!’ Tash cried aloud, and the word echoed in the long darkness of the hallway.
This could not be his story. He achieved things in the book that were worthy of recording in a book, good things, even heroic things that saved thousands of people, but his great deeds were forgotten and ignored, the credit for them taken by others. The life of Tash in the book was a bleak and long one, in which nothing was ever again as easy or pleasant as it was now, and where he spent his old age lonely, sick, and useless.
‘This is a stupid book,’ Tash said. Impatient and uneasy, he climbed up on the chair and examined the next book of Tash. This book, too, told his story, in the same grand style as the first one. He did not bother to read it all, but flipped quickly through the pages of this one to see how it ended. In this book he also did great things, but also terrible things, awful things he could not imagine himself doing. He was feared. He was powerful, as great as an Overlord. But still he was alone.
He recoiled from the hateful books, stepping down from the chair so hastily that it fell over, and backed away from the table.
‘You have to choose,’ said a voice from behind him. It was a voice like gold and honey and wine and stone. It did not echo in the emptiness like Tash’s voice had echoed. It did not seem like it could have been made by any ordinary living thing, but only by a god. Tash turned and stared. In the flickering light of the lamp the great lion seemed almost to glow with his own light. He was bigger than the statue Josie had said was of a creature that was like a lion; much bigger. And his head did not have an expression of idiot malice, but something far more terrifying. It was love as Josie had felt it in the chamber of the ruby key: a love that was a love for uncountable billions of billions, ready to sacrifice itself for the good of the many, ready to sacrifice Tash – sadly, lovingly, but without an instant’s hesitation – for the good of the many.
‘Those are both horrible,’ said Tash, heedless of the fact that he was speaking in rather an insolent way to a god. ‘Neither of them have Josie in them.’
‘Josie only comes into your story for a little while,’ said the lion in a voice that was heavy with sorrow, as if he was in some way as sorry as Tash was that this was so.
‘Why?’ asked Tash.
‘No one is ever told any stories but their own, Tash,’ said Aslan. ‘You do not belong in this world. You have come into it by an accident. Good can still come of your being here, if you chose it so. But you are not of this place, and can never be.’
‘Josie doesn’t belong here either,’ Tash protested. ‘Why can’t she be in my story?’
‘Josie will be sent back to her own world when her time has come.’
‘But why? Why does Josie have to go? Why can’t I go with her?’ Tash’s pleas grew less like a human voice, more unearthly, a shrieking almost-wail that you or I would find terrifying to hear on a dark night.
‘You are only free to choose these two things,’ said Aslan. ‘Other men and beasts, and powers greater than men or beasts, have used their freedom to make choices that have bound the choices of others: and this has created the world in which you must choose one of two paths.’ The voice of the lion god was the voice of someone who understood Tash’s pain, who felt it as he did himself.
Tash was silent, but his eyes burned with hurt. He did not understand. It was not fair. He did not want someone else to feel his pain. He did not want someone else to feel his pain and make him suffer it regardless. He had always disliked prophecies and riddles and arguments about the meaning of life, and what the lion god was saying seemed to be all three at once.
‘You need to lead Josie from this place,’ said Aslan. ‘The girl is the only one who can restore the trust that has been broken between men and beasts in these lands, and restore the evil that was done in this place by the Men of Telmar. The sooner she begins, the greater her success will be.’
Tash remembered this from the story he had read in the book with the golden letters on the cover, but dimly, as if it was a story that he had been told many years before. All the details of the stories in the two books were fading from his mind, with only the stark choice presented to him of two grim futures without Josie remaining vivid.
‘If you want her to go, why don’t you tell her yourself?’ Tash asked Aslan.
‘She is not willing to hear me yet,’ said Aslan. ‘But she will hear you. She will follow you, if you take her on this path. But it is not in her nature to choose of her own will to take this path, not yet. Long ago the Men of Telmar did great evil here, sacrificing their own children to seek to prolong their own lives by magic. I turned them into mute beasts then. It is time for their descendants to take their places as speaking beasts: but to do this they will need your help. You have already met the one I have chosen to bring them back. You must lead her, and Josie, to the land of men, to the city of Balan. They will work together with companions they will find there, and then the beasts of Telmar will speak. What is greater, the trust that has been lost between beasts and men in these lands will be remade anew. It will be as it was meant to be in the beginning, and the stain of many evils will be washed away at last.’
The words of the quest Aslan described echoed things Tash dimly remembered reading, sacrifices the Tash of the books would make, deeds he would do that would be remembered as the deeds of others.
‘But I will not be with Josie,’ said Tash.
‘You will not be with Josie.’ The Lion shook his great maned head. ‘Your story is a long one, and Josie only comes into it for a little time.’
Tash bowed his head. He let his arms droop. He felt the unbearable golden presence of the lion like the noon sun in the sky above Telmar, blinding him, parching his skin. He took a long breath, choking back the desire to sob and throw himself on the ground. Then, slowly, he raised his head, straightened his arms, and spoke in a voice that was as calm and human-sounding as he could make it.
‘I will find another way,’ said Tash.
‘There is a little time to change your mind,’ said Aslan. ‘But soon the choice will be made, one way or another. Lead Josie from this place, and set your course toward Balan.’
‘I will find another way,’ said Tash, with determination.
‘We will meet again,’ said Aslan, and bowed his head slightly at Tash, a curiously humble gesture for the lion-god to make to someone so unimportant as Tash. It seemed to Tash as he did so that his eyes were glistening, as if they were brimming with tears.
Tash stood still, letting his eyes focus on nothing. He was happy here. Why did it have to end? Why did his story need to have dropped him in the middle of some vast tangled prophecy?
‘You must go now,’ said Aslan. ‘Josie will be frightened.’
‘Of what?’ asked Tash.
As if in reply, there was a low, deep-throated rumble that Tash thought at first was the lion growling, but which soon seemed to come from all directions. The stone beneath Tash’s feet began to tremble, and dust ran in little streams from cracks in the ceiling.
‘We must go,’ said Aslan. ‘Follow me.’
The lion began to walk down the great hallway, unhurriedly but swiftly, and Tash ran along behind.
The floor shook beneath him like it was a wooden floor hanging from ropes, instead of a stone floor carved into the side of a mountain, and he found it hard to stay upright. The lion kept pace just ahead of him, too vast and too golden and too god-like.
Tash shook the lamp too much, and it went out, but far ahead Tash could see a half-moon of light, and he broke into a full run. He came out into the roofless gallery, and no more than a few seconds later the hillside above the arched entrance to the tunnel gave way, burying it beneath thousands of tonnes of stone and earth and trees with a tremendous crash. When the noise of the landslide had died away, Tash realised that the earth was still again. There was no trace of the lion.
Blocks of masonry had fallen from the walls of the gallery, and the heavy door of wood like iron that he had come through had been twisted off its hinges and lay covered in broken fragments of stone.
Tash ran back to the rooms he shared with Josie and found her standing listening by a window which she had thrown open, filling the room with cold winter air. A bookcase had fallen over, and in another place a pitcher of water was broken on the floor, but the walls and ceilings seemed undamaged.
‘Tash!’ Josie turned to him and threw her arms around his legs, and he could feel the fear drain away from her as she clung to him. ‘I was worried something had happened to you.’ Josie held Tash tight, and the wonderful Josie smell of her hair the colour of new grith stalks drifted up to him. ‘Tash, you are shaking.’
He bent down and gently picked her up. ‘I-‘ he said, finding it hard to speak. ‘I worried about you, too.’
‘It must have been an earthquake,’ Josie said, nestling in Tash’s arms. She felt cold; she must have been waiting here for him with the window open since the earth stopped shaking.
‘You are cold,’ Tash said. ‘I shouldn’t have left you.’ He shut the window, then carried Josie back to a spot in front of the fire.
‘I was worried when I woke up and you weren’t here,’ said Josie. ‘I could hear walls collapsing. It felt like the whole castle was going to fall down. ’
‘This part of the castle seems strong,’ said Tash, drawing a hand across her smooth, cool forehead, smoothing back her hair. She did not protest.
‘I screamed a little,’ said Josie, laughing at herself, and rubbing Tash under his beak. ‘Where were you?’
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ said Tash. ‘So I went exploring.’ He opened his mouth to say more, and closed it. He opened it again, and once again closed it. He could not think of what to tell Josie about the Books of Tash and his meeting with Aslan, things which were already growing dim and dreamlike in his memory.
‘I am so glad you are alright,’ said Josie.
‘I am more glad that you are alright than I am glad about anything,’ said Tash, surprising himself with how much the words were true.