by Tad Williams
“Binabik is right,” she said at last. Beside her the troll nodded his head gravely, but Simon thought he saw a satisfied glint in the little man’s eyes, as though he had been paid a great compliment. “This is far more than the striving of a king and his brother,” she continued. “The contendings of kings can beat down the land, can uproot trees and bathe the fields in blood,” a log collapsed with a pop of sparks, and Simon jumped, “but the wars of men do not bring dark clouds from the north, or send the hungry bears back to their dens in Maiamonth.”
Geloë stood up and stretched, the wide sleeves of her robe hanging like the wings of a bird. “Tomorrow I will try and find some answers for you. Now all should sleep while they can, for I fear the child’s fever will return strongly during the night.”
She moved to the far wall and began putting small jars back on the shelves. Simon spread his cloak on the floor near the edge of the fire well.
“Perhaps you should not sleep so closely,” Binabik cautioned. “A spark leaping out may set you on fire.”
Simon looked at him carefully, but the troll did not appear to be joking. He pulled his cloak back several feet and lay on top of it, rolling the hood into a cushion beneath his head, then carefully pulled the sides up and over himself. Binabik moved away toward the comer, and after a moment of rustling and thumping made himself comfortable as well.
The song of the crickets had died out. Simon stared into the shadows that flickered in the rafters, and listened to the gentle hiss of the wind passing endlessly through the branches of the circling trees and out across the lake.
No lanterns were burning, and no fire; only the mushroom-pale light of the moon filtered in through the high windows, painting the cluttered room with a kind of frost-sheen. Simon stared around him at the curious, unrecognizable silhouettes that littered the tabletops, and the blocky, inert shapes of books stacked in crooked piles, sprouting up from the floor like grave markers in a churchyard. His eyes were drawn to one particular book that lay spread open, gleaming white like the flesh of a bark-stripped tree. In the middle of the open page there was a familiar face—a man with burning eyes, whose head wore the branching antlers of a stag.
Simon looked up at the room, then back to the book. He was in Morgenes’ chambers, of course. Of course! Where had he thought he was?
Even as the realization came to him, as the silhouettes took on the familiar shapes of the doctor’s flasks and racks and retorts, there was a cautious scraping noise at the door. He started at the unexpected sound. Diagonal stripes of moonlight made the wall seem to lean crazily. The scraping came again.
“…Simon…?”
The voice was very quiet, as though the speaker did not wish to be heard, but he recognized it instantly.
“Doctor?!” He leaped to his feet and crossed to the door in a few steps. Why hadn’t the old man knocked? And what was he doing coming back so late? Perhaps he had been away on some mysterious journey, and had foolishly locked himself out—that was it, of course! Lucky that Simon was there to let him in.
He rumbled with the shadowy latch. “What have you been up to, Doctor Morgenes?” he whispered. “I have been waiting for you for such a long time!” There was no answer.
Even as he worked the bolt from the slot, he was filled with a sudden sense of unease. He stopped with the door half-unbarred, standing on his tiptoes to peer down through a crack between the boards.
“Doctor?”
In the inner passageway, splashed in the blue light of the hall lamps, the old man’s hooded, cloaked form stood before the door. His face was shadowed, but there was no mistaking his tattered old cloak, his slight build, the wisps of white hair that straggled from his hood, blue-tinted in the lampglow. Why wouldn’t he answer? Was he hurt?
“Are you all right?” Simon asked, swinging the door inward. The small, bowed figure did not move. “Where have you been? What have you found out?” He thought he heard the doctor say something, and bent forward.
“What?”
The words that rose up to him were full of air, painfully harsh. “…False…messenger…” was all he understood—the dry voice seemed to labor at speech—and then the face tilted up, and the hood fell back.
The head that wore the ragged fringe of white hair was a burnt, blackened ruin: a knob with cracked, empty pits for eyes, the spindly neck on which it wobbled a charred stick.
Even as Simon staggered away, an unfreeable scream lodged in his throat, a thin red line spread across the front of the black, leathery ball; an instant later the mouth yawned open, a split grin of pink meat.
“…The…false…messenger…” it said, each word a rustling gasp. “…Beware…”
And then Simon did scream, until the blood pounded in his ears, for the burned thing spoke, beyond a doubt, with the voice of Doctor Morgenes.
His speeding heart took a long time to slow. He sat, breathing raggedly, and Binabik sat beside him.
“There is nothing of harm here,” the troll said, then pressed his palm against Simon’s forehead. “You are chilled.”
Geloë strode back from the pallet where she had replaced Malachias’ blanket, kicked free when Simon’s cry had startled him awake.
“You had powerful dreams like this when you lived at the castle, boy?” she asked, fixing him with a stern eye as if daring him to deny it.
Simon shivered. Faced with that overwhelming gaze, he felt no urge to tell anything but the truth. “Not until…until the last few months before…before…”
“Before Morgenes died,” said Geloë flatly, “Binabik, unless the learning I have has deserted me completely, I cannot believe this is chance, for him to dream of Morgenes in my house. Not a dream like that.”
Binabik ran a hand through his own sleep-tousled hair. “Valada Geloë, if you do not know, how can I? Daughter of the Mountains! I feel that I am listening to noises in the dark. I cannot make out the dangers that surround us, but dangers I know they are. Simon dreams of a warning against ‘false messengers’…but that is one only of too many mysterious things. Why the Norns? The Black Rimmersman? The filthy Bukken?”
Geloë turned to Simon and gently but forcefully pushed him back onto his cloak. “Try and go back to sleep,” she said. “Nothing will enter the house of the witch woman that can harm you.” She turned to Binabik, “I think, if the dreaming he has described is as coherent as it seems, he will be of use in our search for answers.”
Lying on his back, Simon saw the valada and the troll as black shapes against the firefly gleam of the embers. The smaller shadow leaned close to him.
“Simon,” Binabik whispered, “are there any other dreamings that have been left out? That you have not told?”
Simon slowly wagged his head from side to side. There was nothing, nothing but shadows, and he was tired of talking. He could still taste the fear from the burned thing in the doorway; he only wanted to surrender to the sucking pull of oblivion, to sleep, to sleep…
But it did not come so easily. Although he held his eyes tightly closed, still the images of fire and catastrophe rose before him. Tossing in place, unable to find a position that would encourage his tight muscles to loosen, he heard the quiet talk of the troll and the witch woman scratch away like rats in the walls.
Finally even that noise ceased, and the solemn breathing of the wind rose again in his ears; he opened his eyes. Geloë was sitting alone before the fire, shoulders up like a bird huddling from the rain, eyes half-open; he could not tell if she was sleeping or watching the fire smolder out.
His last waking thought, which rose slowly up from deep inside him, flickering as it came like a fire beneath the sea, was of a tall hill, a hill crowned with stones. That had been in a dream, hadn’t it? He should have remembered…should have told Binabik.
A fire sprang up in the darkness of the hilltop, and he heard the creaking of wooden wheels, the wheels of dream.
When morning came, it did not bring the sun with it. From the window of the cottage Simo
n could see the dark treetops at the far edge of the bowl, but the lake itself wore a thick cloak of fog. Even directly below the window the water was hard to see, slowly swirling mist making all things hazy and insubstantial. Above the top of the murky treeline the sky was a depthless gray.
Geloë had marched the boy Malachias out with her to gather a certain healing moss, leaving Binabik behind to tend to Leleth. The troll seemed faintly encouraged about the child’s condition, but when Simon looked at her pale face and the faint movements of her small chest he wondered what difference the little man could see that he could not.
Simon rebuilt the fire from a pile of dead branches that Geloë had stacked neatly in the corner, then went to help change the girl’s dressings.
As Binabik peeled the sheet back from Leleth’s body and lifted away the bandages Simon winced, but would not let himself turn away. Her whole torso was blackened by bruises and ugly toothmarks. The skin had been torn from under her left arm to her hip, a ragged slash a foot long. As Binabik finished cleaning the wound and bound her up again with broad strips of linen, little roses of blood bloomed through the cloth.
“Does she really have a chance to live?” Simon asked. Binabik shrugged, his hands engaged in the making of careful knots.
“Geloë thinks she may,” he said. “She is a woman of a stern and direct mind, who places people not above animals in her esteem, but that is still esteem most high. She would not struggle against the impossible, I am thinking.”
“Is she really a witch woman like she said?”
Binabik pulled the sheet up over the little girl, leaving only her thin face exposed. Her mouth was partly open; Simon could see that she had lost both her front teeth. He felt a sudden, bitter ache of empathy for the child—lost with only her brother in the wild forest, captured and tormented, frightened. How could the Lord Usires love such a world?
“A witch woman?” Binabik stood up. Outside, Qantaqa clattered up the front door bridge: Geloë and Malachias would be close behind. “A wise woman she certainly is, and a being of rare strength. In your tongue I understand ‘witch’ to mean a bad person, one who is of your Devil and does her neighbors harm. That the valada is certainly not. Her neighbors are the birds and the forest dwellers, and she tends them like a flock. Still, she was leaving Rimmersgard many years ago—many, many years ago—to come here. Possible it is that the people who once lived around her thought some nonsense as that…perhaps that was the cause of her coming to this lake.”
Binabik turned to greet the impatient Qantaqa, scratching through the deep fur of her back as she wriggled in pleasure, then took a pot out to the front door and lowered it down into the water. Returning, he hung it on a hooked chain over the fire.
“You have known Malachias from the castle, you said?”
Simon was watching Qantaqa: the wolf had trotted back down to the lake and was standing in the shallows, lunging at the water with her snout. “Is she trying to catch fish?” he asked, laughing.
Binabik smiled patiently and nodded. “And catch them she can do, too. Malachias?”
“Oh, yes, I knew him there…a little. I caught him once, spying on me. He denied it, though. Did he speak to you? Did he tell you what he and his sister were doing in Aldheorte, how they were captured?”
Qantaqa had indeed caught a fish, a shining silver thing that fluttered wildly but pointlessly as the wolf mounted onto the lake’s edge, streaming with water.
“More luck I would be having trying to teach a rock to sing.” Binabik found a bowl of dried leaves on one of Geloë’s shelves and crumbled a handful into the pot of boiling water. Instantly, the room was full of warm, minty smells. “Five or six words I have heard from his mouth since we found them up in that tree. He remembers you, though. Several times I have seen him at staring at you. I think he is not dangerous—in fact, I have a real sureness of it—but still, he is in need of watching.”
Before he could speak, Simon heard Qantaqa give a short bark down below. He looked out the window in time to see the wolf spring up, her mostly-devoured catch left on the lakeshore, and bound away up the path; within a moment she had disappeared into the mist. She soon came trotting back, followed by two dim shapes that gradually became Geloë and the odd, fox-faced boy Malachias. The two of them were talking animatedly.
“Qinkipa!” Binabik snorted as he stirred the pot of water. “Now he is speaking.”
As she scraped her boots at the doorway, Geloë leaned her head inside. “Fog everywhere,” she said. “The forest is sleepy today.” She entered shaking out her cloak, followed by Malachias, who again looked wary. The color was high in his cheeks.
Geloë went promptly to her table and began sorting out the contents of a pair of sacks. Today she was dressed like a man, in thick wool breeches, a jerkin, and a pair of worn but sturdy boots. She exuded an air of calm force, like a war captain who had made all possible preparations, and now waited only for the battle to commence.
“Is the water ready?” she asked.
Binabik leaned over the pot and sniffed. “It is seeming to be,” he said after a moment.
“Good.” Geloë untied a small cloth bag from her belt and removed a handful of dark green moss, still shiny with beads of water. After dumping it unceremoniously into the pot she stirred it with the stick Binabik had given her.
“Malachias and I have been talking,” she said, squinting down into the steam. “We have spoken of many things.” She looked up, but Malachias only ducked his head, his pink cheeks even reddening a bit further, and went to sit beside Leleth on the pallet. He took her hand and stroked her pale, damp forehead.
Geloë shrugged. “Well, we shall speak when Malachias is ready. For now, we have tasks enough, anyway.” She lifted some of the moss on the end of the stirring stick, poked it with her finger, then plucked a bowl from a small wooden table and scooped the whole sticky mess out of the pot. She carried the steaming bowl over to the mattress.
While Malachias and the witch woman made poultices of the moss, Simon walked down to the lakeside. The outside of the witch woman’s cottage looked quite as odd by daylight as the inside seemed by night; the thatched roof came to a point, like a strange hat, and the dark wood of the walls was covered all over in black and blue rune-paintings. As he walked around the house and down to the shore the letters disappeared and reappeared as the angle of the sun changed. Mired in the dark shadows beneath the hut, the twin stilts on which it stood also seemed covered with some kind of unusual shingles.
Qantaqa had returned to the carcass of her fish, delicately worrying the last bits of meat loose from the slender bones. Simon sat beside her on a rock, then moved a bit farther away in response to her warning growl. He threw pebbles out into the swallowing mist, listening for the splash, until Binabik came down to join him.
“Break your fasting?” the troll asked, handing him a knob of crusty dark bread liberally smeared with pungent cheese. Simon ate it quickly, then they sat and watched a few birds picking in the sand of the lake shore.
“Valada Geloë would like you to join us, to be part of the thing we are to be doing this afternoon,” Binabik said at last.
“What thing?”
“Searching. Searching answers.”
“Searching how? Are we going somewhere?”
Binabik looked at him seriously. “In some way, yes—no, do not be looking so cross! I will explain.” He cast a pebble. “There is a thing that is done sometimes, when ways of finding things out are closed. A thing that the wise can do. My master Ookequk called it walking the Road of Dreams.”
“But that killed him!”
“No! That is to say…” the troll’s expression was worried as he searched for words. “It is to say, yes, he died while on the road. But a man may die on any road. That is not meaning that anyone who walks upon it will be dying. People have been crushed by carts in your Main Row, but hundreds of others walk upon it every day without harm.”
“What exactly is the Road of Dreams?”
Simon asked.
’I must first admit,” Binabik said with a sad half-smile, “that the dream-road is more dangerous than Main Row. I was taught by my master that this road is like a mountain path higher than any others.” The troll lifted his hand in the air above his own head. “From this road, although the climbing of it has great difficulty, you can see things that never otherwise would you have seen—things that from the road of every-day would be invisible.”
“And the dream part?”
“I was taught that by dreaming is one way to mount up to this road, one any person can do.” Binabik furrowed his brow. “But when a person reaches to the road by ordinary night dreaming, he cannot then be walking along the road: he sees from one spot only, and then must come back down. So—Ookequk told to me—this one does not often know what he is looking at. Sometimes,” he gestured out at the mist that clung to the trees and lake, “it is only fog that he sees. The wise one, though, can be walking along the road, once he has mastered the art of climbing to it. He can be walking and looking, seeing things as they are, as they change.”
He shrugged. “Explaining is difficult. The dream-road is a place to go and see things that cannot be seen clearly where we stand beneath the waking sun. Geloë is a veteran of this journey. I have been given some experience of it myself, although I am no master.”
Simon sat staring quietly out across the water for a while, thinking about Binabik’s words. The lake’s other shore was invisible; he wondered idly how far away across the water it was. His tired memories of their arrival the day before were as hazy as the morning air.
Now that I come to think of it, he realized, how far have I come? A long way, farther than I thought I would ever travel. And still have many leagues to go, I’m sure. Is it worth the risk to better our chances of reaching Naglimund alive?
Why had such decisions fallen on him? It really was horribly unfair. He wondered bitterly why God had picked him out for such mistreatment—if indeed it was true, as Father Dreosan used to say, that He kept His eye on everyone.