Forge of Stones

by Vasileios Kalampakas

  A dead tree gives no shelter

  The Pilgrim aroused Molo from his fretful sleep with a nudge. Molo woke up with a gasp, his body tense, his face and palms sweaty. The Pilgrim thought his brother was troubled, as he had been for the last two nights. It was as if the spirits of the land and sky were not in his dreams; as if they did not safekeep him from the malevolence of the archenemy.

  He would pray for his brother at dawn; he hoped something lesser was troubling him. Some lover, or a wife. His children, perhaps. He couldn’t know yet, he wasn’t learning his brother’s tongue as fast as he wished. But he understood his brother’s pilgrimage was different. They had taken the same path for the same reasons, but there were different customs to be obeyed.

  Perhaps, his brother was unlucky enough to have a wife and children that he had needed to leave behind. Perhaps a lover was awaiting his return. That might be the reason he suffered at night. He embraced his brother’s arms reassuringly, and nodded to himself.

  He started walking again, towards the direction the walking stone pointed to. The night was chilly but dry; the desert was a harsh, rocky field of red and brown. It was good enough for walking, but useless for everything else.

  Very little was to be found in the way of a shelter, and water was as scarce as snow flakes in the summer. The land offered little more than burrowing furry creatures and small sand lizards in the way of eating. God provided, as ever, but his brother was uneasy with what they were able to gather. At first he would not even taste the food, even when cooked on fire.

  When hunger took over him though he mellowed, and grew wiser to the ways of God in His Holy place. Still, he seemed to be somewhat reserved in his adoration; somewhat aloof at times as if his mind wandered elsewhere. He could hear him sometimes speak in his native tongue, other times in the tongue of the Pilgrim’s people.

  In his sleep, he talked as well. The Pilgrim could not make much, though he sometimes spoke of the Forge of Stones. ‘He is young, I’ll give him that,’ thought the Pilgrim and his mind echoed with worry: ‘He has not yet had the time to fully embrace God in his true, purest, unblemished form. Here, in his Holy Land, where he is most welcome, were His Truth sublimes us all, even rock and sand’. The Pilgrim felt his brother would learn though, in due time.

  The Pilgrim saw in him a fervency, an ardor. He saw the determined glitter in his eyes, the way he looked at the Path, the awe when faced with the suns setting over where His Gardens lay. He was worthy of the travel, and the peril. He was a brother sent from God, indeed. Though his brother’s purpose was still to be revealed, the Pilgrim knew in his heart his own was renewed; that he should act as this man’s mentor and tutor, as a wise and benevolent father to fill his heart and mind with the joy that was God and Truth.

  The Pilgrim’s heart burned with vigor and his mind felt inundated in these warm thoughts of God and His work and plan. He was so enthralled with what God had in stock for them both that he had barely noticed his brother was not walking alongside him. He checked behind him but he could not make out his brother’s figure in the blooming starlight. ‘He must have fallen asleep again,’ the Pilgrim thought.

  So he walked back over to the small sandy crest where they had curled up and laid themselves to sleep. He would be cold now that there was no god-stone to bring them light, heat and comfort. ‘I should have been more thorough when I woke him,’ the Pilgrim thought while walking with a sure, easy pace, slowly climbing to the top of the crest.

  There, he saw him sleeping serenely this time. The Pilgrim momentarily thought he should leave him be for a little while longer, but night had fallen for sometime now and they had to take advantage of it as best as they could. When the suns rose again in the morning, the heat and the cloudless sky would make traversing the desert an insufferable affair.

  They should be at the Dunes come morning, where the sea of sand could claim a man’s life if he wasn’t ready for its tribulations. God would provide, but man should be wary as ever. Many Pilgrims before him perished while traversing the Dunes, and left nothing but bleached bones as a warning to those that came after them.

  The Pilgrim shook Molo more violently, this time making sure he would wake up, stand on his feet and walk with him. It was for their own good and the good of the Pilgrimage. It would not serve God if they tarried and indulged themselves. That was one of the lessons his brother had still to learn.

  Molo stirred and moaned a complain, something unintelligible even if the Pilgrim could understand his language. He rose from the ground wearily and languidly. He put a hand out as if letting the Pilgrim know he was really awake this time. He talked in low Helican, the commoners tongue, with signs of exasperation in his face and a disgruntled voice:

  “I’m up. I’m up, you heartless driver. Don’t you get tired? Don’t you need to sleep? I guess you’re used to this sort of thing. When will we be getting there? Do you really know or are we wandering aimlessly? You still don’t understand a single word I’m saying, right?”

  The Pilgrim smiled and made the hand gesture for ‘God will provide’, turned around and started walking while faintly motioning Molo to follow him with a flick of his wrist. Molo sighed wearily and started walking behind the Pilgrim in a disheartened fashion; he was almost shuffling his feet, kicking up small clouds of fine dust in the process.

  The Pilgrim said something that Molo could not understand perfectly; something about the weary man finding consolation in God’s plan, but he wasn’t sure that was the proper translation. The man spoke High Helican, but it had somewhat mutated over the years probably, flex and intonation at wild variance from the original.

  A strange thought came unbidden to Molo then: he thought that maybe it was the other way around, maybe the High Helican Molo had learned was the mutated form and not the original. Such linguistic considerations though mattered little since the only thing the man ever talked about was God, his plan, and this Pilgrimage he was on. That was alright with him; he didn’t really care if the Pilgrim was a half-mad ascetic fanatic, as long as he brought him to the Necropolis. Then, he would see what he might do with him. Perhaps he knew more than he let on from time to time about the place. He talked of gardens and a citadel, and a forge of some kind.

  He’d stick around, as long as the Pilgrim proved his usefulness. If they ever got there, that was. They had been wandering farther into the desert for a couple of days now. They had left the marble road behind two nights before, and that was about the time when Molo had run out of food. Perhaps the man had saved their lives, with his uncanny ability to find sustenance in such a forlorn and inhospitable place.

  Though lizards and rats were not real food, it somehow became agreeable when one had not eaten in three days and the smell of cooked meat wafted into the nostrils. Molo shuddered at the memory of the Pilgrim cutting the lizard’s head off, skinning it, and eating it raw, from limb to limb. The man was a savage, that much was certain, but he somehow knew more about the Widelands than any man alive. He had only identified himself as ‘Pilgrim’, but that much was enough for Molo to call him by when the need arose.

  They were walking through a rocky desert, sometimes passing through low crests on the same direction. From what Molo could gather from where the suns rose and fell each day they were walking roughly towards the northeast; curiously enough that was one of the few things that seemed to make sense. The terrain had progressed from a rough savannah into a rocky desert, and it seemed like soon they were about to enter the great sand dunes he had read about in Umberth’s accounts.

  From then on, he’d be almost lost. Esphalon had written down that once they had entered the sand dunes, the pack mules they had brought with them died being skinned to death in a sand storm they themselves barely escaped alive through sheer luck and perhaps as Esphalon had put it, providence. That was when they met the girl that went on to lead them to the Necropolis per se, which they had failed to enter after fruitless days of labor.

  The girl was the one who sustained
them through these perils, producing food and water out of what seemed to be thin air. That was not all though: The girl was quite insistent in preventing them in their efforts to enter the Necropolis proper, what Esphalon had described as ‘a gargantuan cluster of megalithic buildings that either shone or absorbed light, tightly packed together as if they were wood on a basket, encircled by a wall that itself defied logic in size, shape, and function’.

  She had even used some kind of invisible force on them, on more than one occasion. She had began to weep and talk incessantly, begging them to halt their efforts, as she ‘pushed us away from what could have been an entrance point to the dead city, what Master Umberth called a Necropolis. She did not seem to be angry or wrathful because of our attempts but rather terrified, pleading with us to leave the place’.

  Molo hoped the Pilgrim would be much more helpful in that respect. After all, he had told him he had to enter the Holy Gardens and pay his respects in the Citadel of God to reaffirm his people’s faith in him, and be rewarded with the Forge of Stones. Those were the exact words he had used, in heavily accented High Helican.

  To Molo that sounded like the man was planning to enter what Umberth had dubbed the Necropolis of the Widelands. Indeed, he was not simply planning on doing such a thing but was actually driven by a religious fervor Molo had not seen even in the Ministers of the Pantheon, or the most pious and faithful of the lowly people that clung to such notions like a man about to drown clinging on a driftwood. This Pilgrim though, was a different sort altogether.

  His faith drove him; it inspired him, steeling his determination and making him unwavering in the face of adversity. The contrast with the Ministers of the Pantheon was sharp: they instilled fear, caution, piety, obeisance, and misery. A faithful man for Molo was a fool, a person reduced to a muttering idiot who felt the Gods were in his favor if his children were not taken away from him, and his crops were not dying of thirst or the cold of winter. The contrast was painfully sharp, and the effects of Pilgrim’s faith on the psyche more than intriguing.

  All around them the land was still, without even the sounds of scurrying desert rats or the rush of wind from a night gale. All he could hear was their feet on dirt and sand, and perhaps the sound of gravel as they trod their feet over rough patches of it.

  He noticed how much his boots were worn out by now. It was not the many miles he had traveled until he met the marble road that had made them so. It was the relatively few days he had been walking in the Widelands that had made him feel he should’ve packed a pair of boots with him. The hot days and chilly nights had put some stress on the boot’s leather skin, but it was mainly due to the pervasive asperity of this place, this outer desert, and the abrasive nature of the rocky ground; the mix of dust, sand, dirt and gravel that had made his boots little less than sheets of leather about to slit themselves open.

  It remained a mystery to Molo how the Pilgrim could remain unperturbed by the roughness of the terrain, the adverse conditions, and the unforgiving miles he had walked to get here in the first place. As far as Molo knew, the Pilgrim’s people were nomads living in the cold, harsh tundras of a northern island. It was understandable that he would be proficient in survival skills, but his ability to adapt to changes in climate and terrain seemed unrivaled.

  But there were also the strange stones Molo had noticed the Pilgrim carried with him. These were small stones but regularly shaped, as if they were purposefully cut by human hands. They were dark green, with violet and cyan lights flashing in the morning suns, their surface smooth but with mysterious shapes looming right below it, like patterns that kept changing each time you looked at one. They closely resembled what Molo had known as keystones, though he had never really gotten his hands on one.

  The Pilgrim used one of the stones as a guide, for getting his direction straightened out. Molo had noticed that every time the Pilgrim used it, always after offering praise to his God and praying, he slightly changed course as if adjusting to what the stone showed him. Molo deduced that the stone was able to point him somehow to the direction of the Necropolis.

  He had briefly entertained the idea of killing the Pilgrim and getting the guiding stone for himself. He had decided against such an action though because he believed the Pilgrim would be much more useful when they actually entered the Necropolis. The other stone he used was entirely fascinating as well.

  It was what the Pilgrim used for shelter in this forsaken land, and probably something his people also used to stay alive in the harsh tundras of the north. The stone was a marvelous object: It offered them a small glowing light, enough to see each other’s face in the dark, and it exuded warmth but unlike a fire, the warmth did not seem to radiate from the stone. It felt as if they were enclosed in a bubble of sorts where pleasant warmth occupied it, and the sounds and the wind outside were kept at bay as if by magic.

  Indeed each time the Pilgrim used it, it was as if they were suddenly put inside an invisible bubble of glass that was protective and mindful of their basic comfort. From what he had seen, he believed that whatever the conditions outside, such a stone could keep them warm and dry; it was exactly what a body would need to stay alive in any climate. Molo sniggered at the thought of such a fantastic artifact of mysterious origins and unheard of qualities as that stone, in the hands of a savage that could barely use a wheel, if in fact he had ever seen one in his life.

  But Molo felt there was probably so much more he could learn from the Pilgrim. So many mysteries that could be unraveled just because the Pilgrim knew these things, like he had always known them. As if it were rote, custom, and legend that was passed on from generation to generation.

  Molo thought more about how the Pilgrim had introduced himself at first, and remembered that he had referred to himself as ‘a’ Pilgrim. Which meant that there were others as well. Or there had been others in the past. He had not broached the subject because when he did ask the Pilgrim about things, even about relatively simple things like what they would eat or when would they stop for a break, the answers he received were nothing short of enigmatic, occluded by religious reverence and pious deference to God and his plan.

  Molo believed that asking him about his Pilgrimage was a bad idea; the dark-skinned man would erupt in a series of prayers and gestures, reciting long stories of tradition as well as many other minutiae that would only complicate his efforts at understanding whatever useful information and knowledge he could offer.

  He believed that it was best he gathered what the Pilgrim would share without knowing, and infer whatever knowledge he could from scraps of information alone. When the time came perhaps Molo could press him for more, or do away with him outright. He did not think the Pilgrim could be extorted through fear or driven to betray his beliefs.

  Even if his life was forfeit, he would rather think himself as a martyr: a holy failure. In that regard, Molo had to endure his presence and learn as much from him as possible through what little interaction they had. Truthfully though, Molo did not think he would have been able to survive the tribulations of the desert had it not been for the Pilgrim and his stones.

  The Pilgrim had turned around to check up on how far behind he was. He noticed Molo was grinning, and smiled with puzzlement and naivety. Molo took the chance to build more of a rapprochement with the Pilgrim, something he could perhaps use later on.

  He remembered that according to Esphalon, the nights when Pyx, the brightest star in the sky hung low in the sky, were held as having special significance to his people for some reason he had not stayed long enough to decipher and understand. He had noted down how they paid homage though, which was by turning to face Pyx, kneel down with folded arms and kiss the ground. Luck, it would seem was smiling to him: Pyx was flaring bright and low in the horizon. He turned to face the lone star and went through the motions as well as he remembered.

  When he rose again, he saw that the Pilgrim was wearing a sad expression on his face, as if he had seen a sorrowful sight. It was an unexpected
reaction that made Molo try to copy his sullen mood, as if such was the appropriate thing to do. He suddenly looked solemn and respectful, just like the Pilgrim. The Pilgrim simply told him a single word: ‘apalgos’. He then bowed his head and made the sign of God, and resumed his walk as none of that had ever happened.

  Molo had not known that word. He had never seen it in scripts or texts, and it seemed to have no other common root or sound like anything he could understand. It was as if the word was new, or his vocabulary was incomplete. It baffled him, and made a mental note to himself to perhaps ask the man to describe it later.

  He had seen how the Pilgrim had reacted when he had in error used the word ‘Gods’ instead of ‘God’, and he had instantly known the Pilgrim was a dangerous fanatic. It would not serve him well to have to kill him if he ever found out he was not really a fellow believer. He used the word ‘our’ when referring to God, as well as ’brother’ and ’believer’ when referring to Molo, who had never thought that learning High Helican would ever come to be of such a use in his quest.

  The Pilgrim on the other hand, felt he understood his brother better. Everything made much more sense to him, if the man was on a journey of sorrow. It was only natural if he was grieving that he’d be troubled in his sleep, though aloof sometimes, disenchanted and forgetful in his devotions.

  In a way, the Pilgrim thought, the Pilgrimage was even harder on his brother who had lost a loved one. It was indeed a mixed sign for the Pilgrim: a grieving man on the Land of God that needed guidance and help to make it through alive and be free of his sorrow, alongside a Pilgrim that needed a focus lest he stray from the path of Truth, and fail his people and his God.

  He had not heard of such a Pilgrimage before. He felt like the starlight shone upon him with the brightness of his God’s light. He felt inundated with honor and love, but he was wary of such sudden rushes of strong feelings, and breathed slowly, carefully rearranging his thoughts and feelings to protect him from the sins of pride and arrogance.

  It was in God’s hand alone the manner in which his Pilgrimage would take place, and that was all that he needed to know. It did not mean he was special. It meant that he carried a special burden, and had a special purpose in life. Himself, he was but a man of God, as was his brother. They both had their reasons to walk this path. He felt reassured now, and he troubled his mind with such thoughts no more.

  They walked in silence from then on, until their legs were sore and their throats dry. In the middle of the night, with nothing but the stars to shine upon their eyes reveling in their divine solitude, the Pilgrim stopped walking and gestured for Molo to do the same with a repetitive downward motion of his hand.

  He did not like to use the words of God in His Holy Land in vain, or for mundane things such as simple communication. He found out the hand gestures and nods were enough, and his brother understood what he meant most of the time. Sometimes his brother spoke in this other tongue of his: a somewhat crude, harsh tongue, that seemed to resemble the Holy Tongue somewhat, but was far from it. Maybe it was a way to speak a form of his tongue without speaking the Holy Tongue vainly. Maybe their tribe was older and their customs still clung to the time before the Purge whereas they, the God’s chosen children, had been instructed in different ways.

  It was a miracle indeed to find another believer, another man of God, whose people had survived the Purge so far away. The wise men had always said that God works in mysterious ways, and lo and behold, a brother long lost is found wandering in God’s Holy Land.

  But it was real, as real as his purpose; as real as the True Path, as real as anything he had believed in since he was born. He was sitting down with his legs crossed while all those feelings of certain faith and the warm knowledge of God’s plan working so delicately through him had left him with a smile on his face and tears welling in his eyes. He held those tears, feeling he would be misjudged by his brother and that would only serve further to his befuddlement, whereas he should be enlightening him by his actions alone.

  The Pilgrim offered Molo his leather flask which was filled with water they had gathered from a meaty, barbed plant, its juices nothing more than water. Molo accepted the flask with a nod, sipped cautiously and dived in a sea of thoughts. It seemed to Molo that soon they would be entering the real no man’s land, where nothing ever grew, and the only change was the shifting of the dunes, slaved forever to the whims of the wind.

  Esphalon’s tales of that part of the Widelands, the inner desert, were sparse and yielded little information. They were mainly concerned about the lack of water and the sandstorm that had almost killed them and denied them of most of their supplies and all their animals. It was a race for survival, and the telling of Esphalon focused more on how they expected their lives to come to an end day by day rather than anything really useful about survival.

  It was the girl that had actually saved them. He would have to trust the Pilgrim for their survival. Unfortunately, he had not yet seen yet the Pilgrim use a stone that would produce food or water like the girl in Esphalon’s account presumably did.

  He strongly believed that the Pilgrim was somehow prepared for the ordeal. It was ironic, Molo thought, that a man like himself who bore a grudging disbelief against all sorts of divine creatures and indeed faith itself had such a strong belief in a man wholly devoted to a fantastic person, a myth.

  The Pilgrim rose and asked for his flask. Molo drank once more, a greedy gulp running down his throat, refreshing and invigorating, exactly what he needed for the rest of the walk. They seemed to have a few hours until the suns rose, and from their unusually prolonged period of rest Molo assumed the Pilgrim was not planning on making any other stops, not anytime soon. That was just as good since the more they walked through this landscape, the less time they would have to spend in this treacherous desert, and the sooner they would arrive at their destination.

  They started off once more and trudged onwards, Molo right behind the Pilgrim. They were silent again as ever and after a couple of hours, weariness and boredom overcame Molo. His pace lessened and soon the distance between him and the Pilgrim began to grow. The Pilgrim took notice at some point, paused, and urged him onwards gesturing with his arms and head. He pointed at the horizon that was starting to colour itself crimson. It meant that dawn was near, and they’d soon stop, rest and sleep. Molo gathered what little of his stamina remained, and with painful effort picked up his pace.

  In a matter of minutes, the suns would make their bright entrance and wash away the night completely. The Pilgrim stopped then, and beckoned Molo to come and sit next to him.

  They were atop a rather wide crested hill of rock and dirt, coarse sand covering its ridge. Molo indulged the Pilgrim and as he climbed the last few feet, he could see the sand dunes before him eating away at the horizon, their crests like waves of sand with their ever-changing nature imperceptible to the naked eye.

  A thin line of blood red, sun yellow and sea blue hung between the sky and the desert. It was the break of dawn and the Pilgrim seemed to marvel at the sight, which Molo could not help thinking was indeed a sight to leave one speechless. The Pilgrim made his morning prayers and Molo followed suit, as had been the case since they had met on the marble road.

  He then started looking around him as if searching for something that he had dropped. He moved over to a patch of sand a few steps away and with deliberate movements of his hands, he began digging into the sand with his bare hands. Molo frowned in puzzlement at this weird behavior, which topped everything the man had done so far.

  Molo was even more surprised when the man briefly paused digging, turned around and nodded to Molo for help. Molo could not imagine the purpose of the Pilgrim’s toils and he thought this entire scene to be acutely comical; it would have made him laugh profoundly if he had not been part of it. He acquiesced though, and soon enough found himself to be digging right beside the Pilgrim.

  Within a few moments, he felt the sand damp under his palms. Perhaps there was reas
on in this, and the reason was water. Soon enough a grin formed on his face while the Pilgrim remained apathetic, almost indifferent. They had dug out a small hole in the sand, where there was enough water to fill their flasks and perhaps drink a handful each. It was downright astonishing that the man simply peered through the sand and found a spot where water could be found barely two feet deep.

  He could have never guessed such a thing for the life of him. The Pilgrim was proving his value to Molo with each passing day and he couldn’t help but feel genuine respect for the man, even though he suspected there had to be some aid from the stone, albeit he had not seen him use one right then and there.

  When their flasks where filled and they had some water to drink, the Pilgrim motioned for Molo to sit in a somewhat flat space of sand. As he did so, he brought out the stone he used as shelter, and set it down roughly between them. He made the sign of god and laid himself down, with his back to Molo. Soon enough, the air felt pleasantly warm. The suns came up, two blinding spots of light walking hand in hand rising across a violet-blue colored sky. Pretty soon, daylight became too bright for the naked eye to handle but where the stone lay, it was pleasantly dusky, and one could actually close his eyes and fall asleep with ease. Molo noticed the Pilgrim had already done that, the outline of his rising and falling ribs following the rhythm of his breathing: slow, deep, and steady. Molo thought to himself he might actually leave the man be, when the time came. ‘After all, what harm can he do when the secrets of the Necropolis are laid bare to me’, Molo thought.

  They had slept away for most of the day. When Molo woke up, it was to the recently-made familiar smell of cooked reptile meat. The Pilgrim was handling the roasting of the meat on his knife expertly. Curiously, Molo noticed for the first time it was a knife with a strangely fashioned two-edged blade: one was serrated and the other seemed to be razor sharp.

  The knife seemed to be made of steel or a similar metal, perhaps even silver, but that could not explain how it had been able to weather time without being reduced to little more than a useless piece of rust. And it seemed certainly implausible that a tribe of nomads on the brink of savagery could have fashioned a finely crafted blade without expert knowledge, foundries, forges and artisans capable of supreme craftsmanship.

  He concluded in his mind that the knife must be a thing of a long forgotten past, a treasured relic that was handed down from one generation to the next, indeed crafted by a civilization the likes of which had erected the Necropolis.

  It was fascinating to witness an ancient relic wielded like a common utensil, nothing more than a tool, when it’s value to knowledge and the unlocking of hitherto unexplainable mysteries could prove to be incalculable. Molo realized he had been staring at the knife for too long, his sight out of focus as if he was still drowsy from sleep, as if his mind raced to meet the dreamworld it had unjustly been forced to escape.

  The Pilgrim jogged him back into reality with a slap on the shoulder that he must have considered an expression of brotherhood and amicability towards him. Molo noticed he was also offering him the knife with the piece of unknown meat on it, charred somewhat on the edges and slightly curled, as if it had been left to roast on the fire for too long.

  Molo thought about inquiring about the origin of the meat, but quickly his inquisitiveness dissipated into a forlorn hope that some of the desert was populated by hares or something equally less hideous than lizards. The smile on the Pilgrim’s face assured him of how wildly imaginative he had become concerning food during the past few days, and grudgingly decided to feed on whatever the Pilgrim had caught.

  In reality, he thought it was quite important to never know what it was that the Pilgrim had offered him, especially since it tasted so much better than the previous things he had been forced to taste by necessity. The thought of actually beginning to enjoy desert-hunted reptile wildlife made him shiver with disgust at himself for even thinking of abasing himself in such a barbaric way.

  Momentarily, the memory of some exquisite sauté veal liver assaulted his mind and he could almost smell its fine taste and texture against his palate. He felt certain he could kill a man for a glass of Fironian dry white. But all that was just tricks of the mind. He knew he was eating something that was meant to crawl and slither instead of walk, fly, or swim.

  The illusion though, when maintained in his mind, was a shelter for his mind. A way for him to ignore the nuances of survival and proceed to complete his aim, his purpose. On that day, he knew he was much closer. The sand dunes beckoned before them, and it would take much more than the mere lack of luxury to prevent him from the most worthwhile of goals.

  Once his hunger was satisfied, he took a swig of water from his own flask and rolled it around his mouth in an effort to wash down the uncannily chicken-like meat. Noticing that the eyes of the Pilgrim were lost in the sea of sand, he sat for a while idly gazing at the dunes, trying to make out anything worth noticing in the amorphous dune crests.

  He felt that they should be moving on right away, but the usually relentless Pilgrim had quietened down and was sitting still and cross-legged on the warm sand, the shelter stone nowhere in sight. To Molo, it looked as if he was basking in the light of the suns, like the lizard he must have deftly caught with nothing but his knife.

  He was serene, his face almost glowing from within. It was like looking at a man who thought his existence was made just and fair by virtue of his devotion to his God, his Truth and his Path. Molo felt like the man was actually basking in a swath of divine light; his God’s gift, a warm and bright light that could fill a man’s soul to the brim, and yet could not possibly be spilled.

  Molo thought those were very strange feelings, and he could not understand how they had suddenly appeared unbidden. He felt a strange kind of sympathy for the Pilgrim, one he could not put down in all detail. Something evaded him, and though such feelings were not totally unknown to him, he had spent a great deal of his life hurtling them aside, uncovering the truth underneath such deceit of the heart and soul, ascribing the true logic behind such manifestations of the human psyche.

  In this case, he was struggling to accept the fact that he had no easy answers, indeed no answers at all. The Pilgrim was a mystery that defied Molo’s reason, since he was unable to fathom why this man exuded this air of spirituality, of homeliness and trust. These were feelings that Molo had years ago cast aside and attributed to man’s various futile efforts at making sense of the world and his existence, making up emotions along the way.

  But here he was, a savage man with no ties to such trappings of the civilized man, a pilgrim that somehow managed to cripple his mind with nothing but a smile and a prayer. Perhaps, Molo thought, these were side-effects of malnourishment and dehydration, a prelude to hallucination. There was something very strange about this Pilgrim. Or, he admitted reluctantly in his mind, he might have been wrong in some of his assertions about various things he had vowed never to revisit again.

  The Pilgrim’s pull on his shoulder brought him to the world of the senses once more. He could see the falling suns, their glare losing its strength as they slowly glided past the sea of sand into a thin velvet horizon of scarlet and violet blue. His nostrils were assaulted by the grains of sand that were starting to float wildly in the air, and he felt his mouth filled with the salt of the earth under his feet. He looked towards the northeast where their path would take them and all he could see was the ashen gray and dull brown-yellow of what he judged to be a cloud made of sand. And they were going to walk right through it, if his sight was as clear as his mind at that moment. The notion rang a deep bell of life-threatening danger that superseded every other thought, feeling and intention. The writings of Esphalon came to his mind, where he had written down about the sandstorm that almost killed them and left them hapless to roam the desert in vain:

  ‘..clouds the size of mountains no man had never even imagined toppled the reign of the suns and cast them down into the night side of the world. The air was suddenl
y thick with dirt and cold as a dead man’s touch, heavy with the sand and stone of the desert sea.

  We made haste to what seemed like a rocky alcove in the distance, barely visible under the cusps of sand that harrowed the very air we drew breath from. The mules would not budge, no matter how much we pulled and pushed them. As the wind grew more intense and sand began to hurt our very skin, we had to abandon them to their fate, mindful to take as much water and food as haste allowed.

  We hid under a rare rocky alcove, while a maddening storm raged just beyond the reach of our palms. A couple of feet separated us from the unwavering madness of this uncaring place that assaulted any form of life with the same deliberate indignation. For hours on end, all our senses were of no use. The howling sounds of the sandstorm ruled supreme, whipping the very earth, tormenting the sky, challenging the reign of night eternal itself.

  When exactly the storm had died down, we knew not. All we could see was starlight shining upon the desert once more, as if nothing of import had occurred. It mattered not that the clean-picked bones of our mules told otherwise. That was the Widelands, and life had no place there.’

  The words of Esphalon coiled in his mind like a snake, ready to leap out from his mouth. He saw the Pilgrim was already putting some distance between them. He called out to him in High Helican so he could understand him without the need for further explanations:

  “A storm is coming! We will die in there!”

  The Pilgrim then turned around and looked at Molo as if he had uttered a nonsensical statement. Briefly, Molo thought he had mispronounced what he had meant to say and his words carried no meaning to the Pilgrim. A moment passed though, and the Pilgrim stroked his beard and nodded knowingly. He gestured for Molo to hurry up and come closer to fill the distance, while he set out again. Perhaps he had an explanation, or had already seen a place that could shield them from the approaching clouds that could grind anything alive down to the bone. When Molo caught up with the Pilgrim a few moments later, he grabbed him by the arm and forced him to stop, asking him in High Helican:

  “What about the storm?”

  To which the Pilgrim replied with a gaze to the sky and the sign of God.

  Molo was now starting to lose his temper. This man must be mad, he thought. His mind raced with the possibility that this man had indeed been mad from the beginning and had somehow made a journey of thousands of miles only to offer himself as sacrifice or something equally idiotic like killing himself because he had sinned.

  But no, that was not the case, Molo decided. He looked at his calm, serene face as he turned to face the sky and praise his God solemnly, and knew that he had a solution, he had an answer to their peril. He was certain of it, and his determination proved it somehow. There was nothing to be afraid, everything was accounted for. ‘It will be alright,’ the thought rang true in Molo’s mind.

  It felt as if the Pilgrim was the source, the reason for these thoughts. He seemed now to Molo like an unyielding, irresistible beacon of hope; he was unmoving as a mountain and stable as rock, a haven for any troubled soul. Molo’s gaze was not as hard as it had been before.

  He relaxed his grip on the arm of the Pilgrim, and his jaw slackened. The dust was beginning to swirl around them, the sand getting in their mouths, trying to bore through their skin. It was a very strange feeling for Molo, surrendering himself, body and mind, to an illogical concept. He stood there transfixed; the Pilgrim knelt down before him, facing the approaching sandstorm head on while all around them the makings of a whirlwind abounded.

  Molo had mysteriously let go of his prohibitions, of his logical and analytical mind, of his reasoning and his fears, and just trusted the Pilgrim. It was all a matter of trust in the Widelands, as far as he could tell. And he had decided to trust the man with his life, and ultimately his purpose in life as well. Which of the two he valued most, he sincerely could not tell.

  The Pilgrim had knelt down, seeing his brother was filled with fear, worry, and doubt. It would be no different to God, for if he had deemed that he should live, he would live, and his brother along with him. If he had deemed that he should die, they would perish, and that would be the end of their lives, for better or for worse.

  But to appease his brother and make him ready for the coming trial, the trial of their souls, he would pray. He would pray loudly and fervently, with ardor and passion. He would sing his praise to God, with all the power his lungs could muster, and he would ask forgiveness for their sins; known and unknown, willing and unwilling.

  He would ask of his God to deliver them, but he would also offer his life and soul as a last service of his own volition, if so God wished. He would speak on behalf of his brother and plead for his salvation, body and soul, because he was a grieving man, born of pain and want; not a sinner whose mind was set, neither a blasphemer who thought himself beyond the reach of God.

  He would pray until the storm had passed and their God had decreed their souls clean, fit for a human being. And his brother would pray with him. He turned around and saw his brother was also kneeling down with eyes closed, his hands buried in the sand. The sky was now bleak, the front of the sand storm coming to greet them head on, the suns drowned in its dark gray wave.

  He turned around then and touched his brother’s arms, who was already doing as he should. He shuddered slightly at his touch and then started crying, in fervor or in fear, the Pilgrim could not honestly tell. The Pilgrim started chanting, his clear voice challenging the howls of the rising wind, cutting a clean path through the hurtling sands towards the heart of the storm. And the wind grew louder and stronger; the sands started to tear at their skin, lashing them like razor sharp tufts of steely grass.

  And then, while the voice of the Pilgrim went on unwaveringly, seeking God, asking him to reach down from where he dwelt and lift them from their grim fate, the suns could be seen in their last streak of light, for once more hiding until the morning came. They left behind them a lukewarm trace of violet, stars already visible on the edges between sky and earth. The storm had cleared; it had dissolved, like God had simply wished it away.

  The wind fell into a light breeze, and the sands quietened down becoming as still as the night that had just arrived. The Pilgrim made the sign of God and stood upwards, gesturing for Molo to follow him. He even offered him his hands which he rarely did, as if he thought it was unbecoming of a man.

  His brother was still on his knees and had just opened his eyes. Without warning he saw tears running down on his cheeks, the look of a man who was blind and could now see again on his face. His brother made the sign of God, this time somehow different than before. It was quite possible, the Pilgrim thought, that his brother was finally beginning to learn how to love God properly, like any man should.

  He pulled him up by his hands and they both walked away into the night. Now that the trial of the storm had passed they should be able to see the Gates by tomorrow night, with nothing but pure starlight shining upon the sacred walls. He briefly considered telling him, but he thought he already knew. Why else, the Pilgrim asked himself, would he be carrying no guiding stone? It was because he knew. Because God had sent him.