“It can be that way sometimes, I suppose. When you attain a long-held desire, and find that the reality can never be equal to the —”
“No,” I said, snapping the word at him. “What do you know about these things? It’s nothing like that!”
“Well,” said Traiben, then. “I am mistaken. I beg your pardon, Poilar.”
And now he was silent, and we walked on that way through a long morning, like two strangers trudging side by side on the same path. Both suns were in the sky. In the thin air of this high country, where there was not a single cloud to shelter us, white Ekmelios burned with great fury and even the distant red sphere of Marilemma seemed to be throwing forth heat upon us. The land began to rise steeply, and as I had suspected the terrain grew more parched the farther we went. And yet I felt a curious emanation coming from the first level of the stepped mountain ahead of us, an odd kind of beckoning, as though a deep sleepy voice were saying.Yes, this is the way, come to me, come to me, come, come.
I said finally, growing troubled by Traiben’s silence and feeling abashed at having spoken to him so harshly, “My mood is dark, I think, because of a dream of Hendy’s, that she told me a few nights back while we were in the valley. The shadow of that dream lies over me even now.”
And I told it to him, just as Hendy had told it to me. When I was done I was shaking with the horror of it all over again; but Traiben only shrugged and said, without much feeling, “The poor woman. What a dark and fantastic notion that is to carry around in one’s head.”
“What if it isn’t just a fantastic notion, though? What if something like that really happens to us when we die?”
He laughed. “After death there is nothing, Poilar.Nothing. ”
“How can you be so sure of that?”
“We talked of this when we were boys, do you remember? Does a candle burn when you put out the flame?”
“We are not candles, Traiben.”
“It’s the same thing. Out we go and that’s the end.”
“And if not?”
He shrugged again. I could see that Hendy’s dream was having no impact on him at all. Or else he was taking great pains to conceal it. Perhaps Hendy was a sore subject with him. It had happened before that he saw some new woman of mine as an impediment to our friendship.
The mountain still seemed to be calling.Come … come … come … What could that be?
But I hesitated to ask Traiben if he felt the same call, for fear that he would think I was suffering from hallucinations. We seemed to be on uneasy terms with each other this day. Our souls were farther apart than I could remember their ever having been.
To lighten things a little I started telling him of my own dream, the happy one of the golden and glittering gods in their wondrous sunlit palace atop the Wall. But Traiben scarcely seemed to be listening. He glanced this way and that, he picked up stones and skipped them into the air, he shaded his eyes and peered off into the distance.
“Am I boring you?” I asked, when I was no more than halfway through.
“It’s a lovely dream, Poilar. Very pretty indeed.”
“But a little on the simple-minded side.”
“No. No. A beautiful vision.”
“Just a vision, yes. And Hendy’s dream is just a nasty fantasy. There’s no reality at all to either of them, is that right?”
“Who can say? We won’t know what death is really like until we die. Nor will we know what the gods are like until we reach the Summit.”
“I prefer to think that the gods are as I saw them in my dream. That perhaps the dream itself was a sending from them, urging us to be steadfast, to stay on the upward trail.”
Traiben gave me a strange look at that. “A sending, you think? Well, maybe so.” After a moment he said, “I would rather believe in your dream than in Hendy’s. But we won’t know until we know. I once had a dream that was just the opposite of yours: did I ever tell you that, Poilar? A blasphemous dream, a really awful dream, a true nightmare. I dreamed that I reached the Summit — and there were the gods, all right, and they were loathsome twisted ghastly things, the most depraved of creatures, such bestial driveling monsters that they would make the Melted Ones look beautiful beside them. And that’s why no Pilgrims who have reached the Summit and returned will ever speak of what they have seen, because they can’t bear to reveal the frightful truth about the gods we worship.” He laughed again, the dry little Traiben-laugh that I knew so well, which was meant to be a casual dismissal of something that in fact was not at all casual to him. Then he said, “Speaking of sendings, have you been feeling anything of that sort while we’ve been walking along just now?”
“A message from the mountain? A pulling — a calling?”
“So you do feel it!”
“And you also.”
“For some time now,” he said. “A voice in my mind, urging me onward.”
“Yes. Exactly so. A voice from the gods, do you think, telling us that we’re on the right path?”
“You have gods on the brain today, Poilar. Who knows what that calling means? Gods — demons — more Melted Ones — another Kingdom ahead —?”
“We should turn back, I think. See whether the others have felt it too. And call a council, and discuss what action we ought to take.”
“Yes,” he said. “A good idea.”
So we hurried along the rocky trail, returning the way we had come. The voice in my mind grew less distinct with every step we took. It was the same for Traiben. By the time we reached the camp we were unable to perceive it at all.
IN MY ABSENCE Astranger had come into the camp, and he was a very strange stranger indeed.
He stood in the midst of the group, and they were all crowding tight around him, as though vying with one another for the closest look. Only Thissa stood to one side, in that brooding way of hers, watching somberly from afar. The stranger rose head and shoulders above nearly everyone: he was taller even than Muurmut and Kilarion. It appeared that he was laughing and joking with them, and that they were hanging on his every word. At first glance it seemed that he had no hair, but then he moved a little and I saw that he had hair only on one side of his head, hair of a very odd sort, white as mountain mist and thick as rope, hanging down in long strands almost to his waist. He was gaunt and hard — virtually fleshless, so you could almost see the outlines of his bones beneath the tight-drawn skin, which was mottled and piebald, black as night in some places and a glaring shiny white in others. His shoulders, though very broad, were oddly wrenched and skewed, as if he had been midway through some change of shape and had become stuck in it; and when I drew near I became aware that he was a crookleg like me, but to a horrifying extreme, for his left leg was far longer than the other one, reaching out at an angle and curving back in like a sickle’s blade. His whole body was gnarled and distorted down its long axis, one hip higher than the other and turned at an odd angle to its mate, which was what caused that leg to jut out the way it did.
When he saw me approaching, he turned to me and grinned. It was meant as a grin, at any rate, but it was cold and cheerless and more like a demon’s grimace than a grin, a two-faced smirk, showing me a mouth of blackened snags, smiling on the one side and scowling on the other. The color of his left eye was different from that of the right, and both his eyes were small and glittering, but glittering in a dull way as though the fire that burned behind them had almost gone out; and the left side of his face was drawn up in a puckered twisted way that reminded me of Min’s, but the thing that had happened to Min seemed like nothing in comparison with this man’s mutilation. Here was surely another who had come in contact somewhere on the Wall with change-fire; but if Min had had a melted look when she came forth from the cave of the Source, this strange lopsided creature looked baked: baked dry, a parched man, baked down to some irreducible minimum.
I could find no words, for a moment.
Then Kath came forward out of the group and said, with something sly in his look, “Do you r
emember this man, Poilar?”
“Remember? From where?”
“From the village, long ago,” Kath said.
“No.” I peered close, and shook my head. “Not at all.”
The stranger stepped toward me and offered me a hand that was as gnarled and twisted as the rest of him.
“My name is Thrance,” he said. I gasped as though I had been struck a blow in the belly. Thrance?Thrance?
Into my mind at once, with the mention of that name, leaped a dazzling unforgettable image out of my boyhood. I was twelve, and it was the Day of Procession and Departure, and Traiben and I were in the main viewing stand, waiting for the new Pilgrims to emerge from the Lodge. And the great wickerwork doors swung open and the Pilgrims came forth, and there was Thrance, Thrance the magnificent, Thrance the flawless, the athlete of athletes, famous for his feats of strength and valor, that man of shining beauty and perfect body, erupting from the Lodge like a force of nature, pausing only a moment to smile and wave before running off in that famous high bounding stride of his toward the Wall. How splendid he had looked that day, how fine! How like a god! And this was Thrance, now? This? This?
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16
THEY WERE ALL STARING — at me, at him, at him again. They wanted to see how I would handle him. And I knew from the brightness of their eyes and the eager look of expectation on their faces that in some magical way this repellent stranger had charmed them, had won them to him in the short while I had been gone. There was something dark and frightening and fierce about him that drew them to him. The fascination of darkness can be irresistible.
My skin crept, as though it sensed a storm heavy with lightning rushing toward us. If this in truth was Thrance, and not some demon wearing his name, then he had been deeply damaged indeed. But despite that damage I could see that there was great strength in him even now, though perhaps it was strength of some kind other than the strength he had had before. It might even be that he was strongbecause of the damage he had suffered. Which made him unpredictable, and therefore dangerous.
For a moment we eyed each other like two wrestlers preparing to begin a match. Looking into those lightless mismatched eyes of his was like peering into an abyss.
I knew that unless I acted without hesitation, he would move somehow to seek the advantage. So I took his dry scaly hand in mine and gripped it firmly, and said very formally, “Poilar is my name, son of Gabrian, son of Drok. I am the leader of this Forty, which comes from Jespodar bound on Pilgrimage. What is it that you want among us?”
“Why,” he replied, speaking in a drawl as though he had found something humorous in what I had said or in the way I had said it, “I think I remember you. Poilar, yes. A little skinny crookleg child, forever scuttling around doing as much mischief as he possibly could, am I right? And now you lead a band of Pilgrims! What changes time will bring, eh?”
I heard the nervous laughter of my companions. They weren’t accustomed to hearing me mocked. But I kept myself in check and held my eyes on his.
“I am that Poilar, yes. And are you really Thrance?”
“I said that was my name. Why would you doubt me?”
“I remember Thrance. I saw him come out of the Pilgrim Lodge and go running up the street. He gave off light, like a sun. He was as beautiful as a god.”
“Whereas I’m not?”
“You look nothing like him. Not in the slightest regard.”
“Well, then, if that’s the case I must be very ugly now. Apparently I’ve undergone some disagreeable changes since coming to this mountain country. If I’m no longer as good to look upon as I once was, I beg you to forgive me for offending your eyes, my friend. Forgive me, all of you.” And in a courtly way he made a little ironic bow to the others, which brought uneasy smiles to their faces. “But I am Thrance, son of Timar, former Pilgrim of Jespodar, all the same.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not.”
“If I’m not Thrance, then who am I, pray tell?”
“How would I know? You could be anyone. Or anything. A demon. A ghost. A god in disguise.”
He gave me that death’s-head grin of his. “Yes,” he said. “I could be. Sandu Sando, perhaps, or Selemoy of the suns. But in fact I am Thrance. The son of Timar the Carpenter, who was the son of Diunedis.”
“Any demon could spout Thrance’s lineage at me,” I told him. “But that wouldn’t make the demon Thrance.”
The stranger looked amused, or perhaps he was merely growing bored with my obstinacy. “Against arguments of that kind no one could ever convince anyone of anything, isn’t that so? I could name my forefathers for ten generations, or all the twenty Houses of the Village, or the other members of my Forty, or anything else you might ask, and you would still say that the demon has picked it out of Thrance’s mind for the sake of deceiving you. Very well, then. Believe what you want. It makes no difference to me. But I tell you I am Thrance.”
I looked toward Kath and said, “Where did this man come from?”
“He simply appeared among us,” Kath said. “As if he had risen right out of the ground.”
“A demon would do that,” I said, with a glance toward the stranger.
“Be that as it may,” said Kath. “One minute we were here by ourselves waiting for you to return and the next he was with us. ‘I am Thrance of Jespodar,’ he said. ‘Have any of you heard of Jespodar, here?’ And when we told him that we were Pilgrims from that very village he began to laugh like a wild man, and to leap up and down and dance about. Then suddenly he grew very stern and somber, and he caught me by the wrist with one hand and Galli by the other, and he said, ‘Who remembers Thrance, then? If you are truly of Jespodar, you would remember Thrance.’ And Galli said, ‘We were only children when you left, if you are Thrance. So we wouldn’t remember you clearly.’ He laughed at that and pulled her close to him and kissed her, and bit her cheek so that it stung, and said, ‘You’ll remember me now.’ Then she asked him about her older brother, who had been in the same Forty as Thrance, and he knew the brother’s name, all right, though he said he had no idea what had become of him, which made Galli start to cry; and then he asked for wine. I said we had none to give him. He got very angry at that, and said again that he was Thrance of Jespodar. To which Muurmut replied, ‘Thrance or no Thrance, we have no wine to give you.’ And then —”
“Enough,” I said. The stranger had wandered off during Kath’s recitation and was standing with Tenilda and Grycindil and a few of the other women. “He is much altered from the Thrance I remember, if in fact this is Thrance. Did he speak at all of what had happened to him?”
“No.”
I was unable to get from my mind that recollected image of the heroic Thrance in all his godlike beauty, nor could I easily reconcile it with the sight of that gaunt and hideously altered creature over there. But for his great height and the breadth of his shoulders there was scarcely anything about this ruined wreck of a man that might sustain his claim of being Thrance. And, although I have never been one to frighten easily, I felt a twinge of something close to fear now as I watched him among the women. There seemed to be madness in him, and some strange fury barely held in check. If he was Thrance, and had spent all these years on the Wall, he might be of some use as a guide to us in this new territory we had entered, or he might not; but almost certainly he was going to be troublesome. I found myself wishing most profoundly he had never appeared in our midst.
He was coming toward me again now, with his arm thrust through Tenilda’s. That sweet Musician looked as though she would gladly have been back on the plateau again rather than so close to this malformed creature that called itself Thrance.
He leaned close to me and said, “They claim you have no wine, Poilar. Is this so?”
“The wine is long since gone, yes.”
“But you must have some.” He winked. It was a cold dead-eyed wink, with little charm or playfulness to it. “Hidden away, for your own use, eh? Come, my friend. Sha
re your wine with me, before we set out from this place to begin our climb together. For old Thrance’s sake. A toast to our success.”
“We have no wine,” I said.
“Of course you do. I know that you have. Do you realize how long it’s been since I’ve had anything decent to drink? Or how I’ve suffered, all alone here on this mountain, Poilar? So get out the wine, and let’s drink.” There was a flat tone in his voice that robbed his words of urgency. I knew he was simply testing me, trying to see how much power he could exert over me. Very likely he had no desire for wine at all. He winked again, a false one as before, and nudged me in what was meant to be a sly conspiratorial way, but lacked conviction. “Just the two of us, you and I. We are brothers of the crooked leg, aren’t we? Look — look — mine’s even worse than yours!”
“The Thrance I remember had straight legs,” I said. “And there is no wine.”
“You still won’t believe that I am who I say I am.”
“I have nothing to go by except your word.”
“I have nothing to go by exceptyour word, when you tell me you have no wine.”
“There is no wine.”
“And I am Thrance.”
“Then you are a Thrance transformed beyond all recognition,” I said.
“Well, so I am. But Kosa Saag is a place where transformations happen. You must always keep that in mind, my friend. And now, about that wine —”
“I’ll say it once more,” I told him, “and then not again. There is no wine.”
He gave me a skeptical look, as though he believed that if he only pressed me hard enough I would bring forth a flask from some secret cache. But there was no secret cache, and I looked at him in such a stony way that he saw that I either would not or, more likely, could not give him any.
“Well, then,” he said. “If you say so, it must be true. There is no wine. We are agreed on that. And I am Thrance. We are agreed on that, also. Eh? Good. Good. What shall we talk about next?”
BUT I HAD HADenough of dueling with this man before all the others. I pointed toward an open place across the way, where we could be alone, and suggested we continue our conversation in private. He thought about that a moment and nodded, and we went limping off together, two crooklegs side by side, to sit by ourselves and talk. As he had said, that leg of his was far more of a deformity than mine. His limp was so bad that he walked in a twisted, lurching way, stepping halfway around himself to move forward, and I had to take something off my pace to accommodate him.