The Runes of Norien

V

  The Boatman whose vessel Wixelor boarded next was even worse than the one before: a hideously deformed man of indeterminate age, whose scarlet-skinned face looked as though it were a mask of wax that had been held too close to a flame, the left side of it sagging an inch lower than the right and stretching the left halves of the nose and mouth to a pair of downward-sloping slits, while the runny left eye seemed about to fall out of its distended, permanently parted lids.

  And as if his appearance wasn’t torture enough, the monstrous Boatman hadn’t been fooled by the beetroot concoction, tossing the vial away and grunting incoherently for more, till Wixelor was forced to drag the sharp nail of his index finger across his left palm and then hold out the hollow of his palm – all the while keeping his eyes closed and trying not to think of the tongue that was noisily lapping up his blood.

  But there was at least one upside to enduring the hardship of this boat ride: the further they got from his island, the weaker the dreams got, until he could almost sweep them away like flies, before they had a chance to overtake his consciousness.

  What if he never went back, he wondered, if somehow he kept moving on, from boat to boat and island to island? The prospect was extremely tempting, (even a few days of unbroken peace of mind seemed wonderful), and yet Wixelor knew that this was an idle fantasy, shared by nearly every Linner at one point or another. Because what would he spend his endless days and nights doing? Staring into the darkness, rowing aimlessly along the Lake and growing steadily madder from inaction? The only life he knew was the life of a Dreamer – it was all he’d ever been, even if at times it became a veritable torment.

  And besides, this was no time for foolish daydreaming; the goal of this journey wasn’t the pursuit of pleasure (a fact made crystal clear by Moraxa and the Boatmen) but the possibility of solving a mystery that grew more obscure and fascinating at every step, and which demanded tackling yet another riddle.

  The riddle that was Huxor the Ponderer.

  One of the oldest folk tales of Ienar Lin, carried across generations of men and women who took comfort in thinking that the madness of others was worse and sillier than their own, was the tale of the Three Ponderers.

  Once upon a time, the story went, there lived upon an island three brothers, the lot of them Ponderers. One day they woke up and found three loaves of bread lying at the foot of their beds. And so, hoping to solve the mystery of the bread’s almost magical appearance, they sat and contemplated it, each one gazing thoughtfully at his loaf.

  The first brother wondered, What is bread? But instead of taking a bite of it to find out, he sat around and mused about the nature of bread, how it was first conceived as an idea and then had become reality – yet that didn’t answer his fundamental question of what was the essence of bread, not its taste or its ability to assuage one’s hunger but the very breadness it possessed even before the wheat was reaped and the dough baked into crust and crumb. And as the days turned into weeks, the Ponderer was so consumed by the profundity of his thinking that he forgot to eat and starved to death.

  The second brother considered the loaf and wondered, Why is there bread? But instead of eating some to satisfy his curiosity, he looked fixedly at the bread and tried to imagine its purpose in the greater scheme of things, why it was this and not something else that had resulted from man’s taming nature to fulfill the need to feed. Could there be planes of reality where bread does not exist, and where his agonizing question would be moot? And as time forged ahead, so lost was the Ponderer in his cogitations that he neglected to tend to his own great hunger and perished from it.

  Finally, the third brother looked at the loaf and wondered, Is this bread real? But instead of touching it to discover whether the bread was real or not, he kept staring at its shape and colour, smelling its aroma and imagining its taste, and all the while thinking, were these senses in accordance with reality, or were they mere illusions planted in his mind by the same cosmic conjurer who had made the nonexistent loaf materialze? And if the bread was unreal, how sure could he be of his own realness? What if both the bread and the man gazing at it were both figments of some otherworldly imagination? And as night gave way to day and one month to the next, the Ponderer still tried to decipher the mystery of the by now stale bread, till his empty stomach devoured itself and he died.

  And once the three brothers met again, as souls in the afterlife, they were greeted by other souls and shown to a vast table where they all feasted for eternity. But just as they were about to take their seat, the Ponderers saw a great basket on the table, and pointing at it they all exclaimed together at the abundancy of bread – whereupon their tablemates exploded into laughter, for the basket was filled not with bread but with onions! And the three Ponderers hung their heads in shame, realizing they had died in vain, pondering about bread when there hadn’t been any bread to begin with.

  Though this was a fable, it wasn’t too far removed from fact – for Ponderers were laden with a task most abstruse and time-consuming (and, in many a Linner’s view, perfetly futile): the gathering and solving – if there were a solution, which often there wasn’t – of the Creation’s most profound and perplexing questions. Is there an absolute truth, and what may it be? Is existence inherently good or bad, and is it better to exist and live through bliss and misery, or not to exist and be deprived of bliss but also elude misery? How infinite was infinity, and how could one ever be sure that the infinity at hand wasn’t one of an infinite number of infinities? Ponderers spent their whole lives immersed in puzzles such as these, yet unlike other Linners, who could save up some modicum of time dedicated to their own real life and its pleasures, Ponderers often couldn’t rid their minds of the staggering cognitive burden, so that they ultimately lost touch with reality, both inner and external, and like the brothers in the tale, some died of thirst or starvation. As for interacting with them, (though it was very rare that anyone sought their help, as their profession was considered dreadfully boring) it was almost impossible, for Ponderers were the embodiment of absent-mindedness, their mind constantly absent from the surface of awareness.

  Yet a few weeks back Wixelor had been visited, thrice in a row, by a confounding dream – and not one of the myriads that streamed through his daily consciousness, but one that came to him at night, during the brief repose which was almost never encroached by dreams other than his own. But somehow Huxor had appeared three times in his sleep, standing before him and speaking two strange words, the same in all three dreams: Erat Rin, he said, and then he melted away into the haze that shrouded him.

  And once Wixelor had obtained proof of the black stones’ mystifying passage through the realms of Norien, Huxor’s odd dream-message instantly became part of the same enigma. Wixelor was convinced that if anyone in Ienar Lin could help him grasp the meaning of the word NOWHERE, it was Huxor the Ponderer.

  And now his island emerged from the darkness, recognizable from the spiral wooden stairs leading up the black rock pillar – for Ponderers, lost in their interminable musings, were often known to walk off the edge of their islands and plummet into the Dark Lake, and if it weren’t for steps like these most of them would drown simply from being too startled to react.

  Wixelor, stepping out of the odious Boatman’s vessel, also felt grateful for the stairs; after his encounter with Moraxa, he didn’t think his worn-out body could handle the exertion of rope climbing.

  One had only to take a glance at Huxor to know at once that he was a Ponderer, and while looking at his unconscious antics, it was all that Wixelor could do not to fall down laughing.

  For one thing, his appearance was comical to the extreme, and reminiscent of some great wise ape leading a life of solitude in the heart of a deep dark forest: being surely no less than five hundred years old, Huxor had probably never bothered to cut his hair, which had grown, mane and mustache and beard, into a long white mass that covered him almost completely – and since he didn’t seem at all aware of the fact,
he was constantly tripping on the thick strands that fanned out round his feet, falling down hard on his face, picking himself up, tripping and falling again, and so on, the result being that what little could be glimpsed of his face was a map of bruises, his nose crooked and caked in dried blood, his eyes black and swollen and his forehead covered with bleeding bumps, as if a dozen horns were trying to sprout from his brow. And all the while he kept a soft steady murmur, his lips, tongue and mouth working at the obscure ponderings as if they were a piece of food that could never be thoroughly chewed.

  Wixelor was at first reluctant to disrupt Huxor’s trance, but after a while the hilariousness of his repeated falls faded, and feeling sorry for the poor old man he slowly approached him and tried to help him up. But although Huxor accepted his assistance, once he was up again he didn’t seem to perceive Wixelor’s presence beside him, picking up his endless trail of thought and pacing on. And when Wixelor tried to stand in his way, the Ponderer merely kept bumping into him like a sleepwalker, or tried in vain to sidestep him, and twice Wixelor had to catch him in the nick of time as he was about to fall off the island’s rim. So eventually he decided to leave Huxor be for the time being, and wandered into his dilapidated house to look for some food for the both of them, since the old Ponderer, besides his battered face, was frightfully gaunt.

  And as he was coming out of Huxor’s home, blowing away the dust on a stony slice of bread, Wixelor started – beccause his host had ceased his pacing and stood a few steps away, staring at him with a small boy’s disbelief at something alien to his narrow world.

  “Are you real?” he said, his voice husky.

  “Yes I am,” Wixelor said, smiling to dispel Huxor’s wariness, and reaching out he touched him softly on the shoulder. “And so are these,” he said, and from his pocket he produced the seven stones and proferred them to Huxor, who, again like a child, goggled his bruised eyes at the smooth obsidian discs and then, without asking, he snatched them away, scuttled to the centre of the island, and crouching down he placed the stones before him – and after quickly rearranging them he turned and beamed at Wixelor.

  “Nowhere,” he said. “A most interesting word.”

  “What can you tell me about it?” Wixelor said, squatting across him and praying that Huxor’s spell of clarity would last long enough for him to get some inkling of an answer.

  “Well,” the Ponderer said, wrapping a strand of his blood-spattered beard around a bony finger, “essentially, nowhere is a paradox. Its literal meaning is a place that doesn’t exist, the total absence of a point in time and space. And yet anything that can be put into words, anything that can be conceived of, may be said to exist in one form or another. In this aspect, nowhere is a concept similar to those of truth or life, which can only be somewhat accurately judged when they are missing. And like them, it may have many interpretations, which vary according to the thinker; to the dweller of a populous castle, for instance, nowhere may be a tenebrous woods, where nothing stirs but beasts of prey, while to a fish nowhere is a place devoid of water and its sustenance.”

  Wixelor was trying hard to apply Huxor’s words to the mystery of the stones, but he was either too tired or not bright enough to make a connection. So, sensing that the Ponderer, if uninterrupted, might embark on an even vaguer monologue, he cleared his throat and said, “Do the words Erat Rin mean anything to you?”

  Huxor frowned momentarily, but then a playful gleam crossed his deep-set, discoloured eyes. And leaning close to Wixelor as if about to divulge a great secret, he whispered, “You know of the Forgotten Sphere?”

  Wixelor’s heart was beating fast and hard. “No,” he said, “but I would love to hear everything about it.”