Together they stripped Knucker of his ragged, profoundly stained clothing. Undressed, he looked even more pitiful than when clothed.
“I wonder when he last ate?” Ehomba murmured as he examined the emaciated torso.
Simna grunted as he tossed short, tattered boots into a corner. “You mean when last he chewed something. This lush has been drinking his meals for some time.”
“Perhaps we can get something solid into him in the morning,” the herdsman speculated.
Pausing in the process of undressing, Simna looked up curiously. “Why do you care? He’s a total stranger and, whether he knows everything or simply less than that, not a particularly admirable one. There are candidates more deserving of your concern.”
“No doubt,” Ehomba agreed, “but they are not here. He is.” He studied the mumbling, self-engrossed figure thoughtfully. “Tell me something, Knucker.”
“What?” Looking up, the exhausted little man they had saved from the demons of the night locked eyes with his rescuer. “Who are you?”
As they laid the drunk down on the clean sheets, Simna ventured a coarse observation on the ingratitude of the inebriated.
When a man stands all day doing nothing but watching cattle and sheep crop grass, he learns patience. “It does not matter,” Ehomba told him. Bending over the bed, he murmured, “Knucker, what is the meaning of life?”
Their charge was already half asleep. His lips moved and Ehomba leaned close. He stood like that, inclined over the bed and its single diminutive occupant, a look of intense preoccupation on his long, handsome face. After a moment he nodded, and straightened.
“I thought so.” His tone suggested quiet satisfaction.
Simna waited. When nothing further was forthcoming, he blurted sharply, “Well?”
The herdsman looked across the bed at his companion. Knucker was sleeping soundly now and, as far as Ehomba could tell, without difficulty. “Well what?”
“Bruther, don’t play the coy with me. What is the meaning of life?”
“Someday I will tell you.” The herdsman started around the foot of the bed, heading for the main room.
“Someday? What do you mean ‘someday’?” Simna followed him, leaving the little man in darkness and silence.
In the main room Ehomba contemplated the couch. After first removing his pack and weapons, he began to arrange himself on the thickly carpeted floor. “When you have grown up.” Stretching out flat on his back, he closed his eyes and crossed his hands over his lower chest.
“Grown up? Listen to me, master of mewling lambs, I’m not one to take kindly to a comment like that!”
One eye winked open to regard the irate swordsman. “Take it any way you like, but keep your voice down. If we make too much noise and wake the other tenants, the landlord is likely to throw us back out into the street.”
“Hoy, him? That soft little self-important innkeeper couldn’t throw Knucker out in the street, and that with him completely unconscious.”
“Then if you won’t be silent for his sake, be quiet for mine,” Ehomba grumbled irritably. “And get some rest yourself. It is not long until sunrise, and I would prefer to spend as few nights as possible in this country that is proper and civilized only during the day and dreadful and deadly after dark.” With that he rolled over, turning his back to the swordsman.
“When I have grown up, is it?” Growling under his breath, Simna divested himself of pack, sword, and raiment and slipped beneath the sheets of the spacious bed. It was still warm from the recent accelerated departure of its former occupant. That did not trouble Simna ibn Sind, who had slept on mattresses swarming with insomniac rats.
He fell asleep still angry, and dreamed of falling into a bottomless well filled with unending buckets of jewels and precious metals. It would have been a good dream, should have been a good dream, except for one pesky vexation.
Ehomba was there also, kneeling at the edge of the well looking down at the swordsman as the latter tossed coins and gems about like colored candy. The herdsman was not laughing derisively, nor was he heaping calumny upon Simna for indulging wholeheartedly in his base desires. All the impassive, compassionate herdsman was doing was smiling.
In his sleep, Simna ibn Sind tossed and muttered, unconsciously infuriated without knowing why.
Breakfast was served in the room by household staff. Sitting up naked in the big bed, the swordsman favored the pretty servant who brought their food with a come-hither grin. Greatly to his chagrin, she ignored him completely. He did not let her rejection prey upon him. He never did. Anyway, it made good sense. Since they were ensconced upstairs, she was most likely not the downstairs maid.
“Not bad,” he told his companions as he masticated fresh rolls with jam and butter, aepyornis egg, bacon, and fruit. As was his nature, he had completely forgotten the brief but heated disputation with Ehomba of the night before.
In his corner, Ahlitah chewed fastidiously on a large leg of raw ox that the landlord had managed to scrounge from the kitchen. Ehomba sat on the floor with his back against the couch as he ate. In between bites and conversing with Simna, he cast occasional glances in the direction of the rear bedroom. The maid had delivered food to its occupant, but whether that worthy was even awake, much less dining, he did not know. As soon as he finished his own food, he would look in on the man they had rescued.
“You are right, Simna. Everything is quite good.” The herdsman set a nearly empty glass of milk aside. “You should thank Knucker. He paid for this.”
“Thank him?” Sitting up in the bed, the swordsman grunted. “We saved his miserable life at the risk of our own. He should be the one thanking us. But of course, he can’t do that, because it would take too much of the worthless wretch’s liquefied brain to string two words together.”
“On the contrary, not only can I string two words together, I can tie them in assorted semantic knots if the need should arise.”
Simultaneously, Ehomba and Simna looked toward the back-bedroom door. Only an indifferent Ahlitah did not glance up from his food. What the two men saw there came close to stunning them both into silence.
Knucker the Knower stood in the portal, but it was not the Knucker they knew. How he had bathed using only the pitcher and basin in the tiny inner bathroom they did not know, but bathe he had. Somehow he had even managed to clean up his clothing along with his body. A knife or razor had been used to remove the ugly stubble from his face. For all they knew, it might also have been the tool of choice utilized to dislodge the significant growth of unidentifiable greenish material from his teeth, which gleamed more or less whitely as he smiled at his saviors.
“I remember everything now.” Stepping into the room, he staggered slightly before bracing himself with one hand against the doorjamb. A rapidly steadying finger pointed. “You—you’re Etjole Ehomba. I heard him”—and he indicated the staring swordsman—“call out your name. And you, you are Slumva—no, Simna. Simna ibn Sind.”
Setting aside the last vestiges of his breakfast, the swordsman slid out of the bed and began to dress, slowly and without taking his eyes off the little man for more than a moment. The litah glanced up briefly before returning to the bone he was crunching in order to get at the marrow within. Smashed or sober, to the big cat humans were all largely the same.
Slipping into his shirt, Simna nodded admiringly at the figure standing unaided by the doorway. “Never would have believed it. I’ve got to hand it to you, little bruther: You’ve gone and pulled yourself up out of the mire. Not many men could do such a thing in a single night. Especially not men as far gone as you were when we dragged you out of that close.”
“I remember that, too. It’s all coming clear to me now.” Taking careful but increasingly confident steps, he walked up to Ehomba and grasped the herdsman’s arms gratefully. “I don’t know how to thank you. Once you’ve fallen as far as I did, you become so dazed and blind you can no longer find the way back up. For that you need help. You two have
given me that gift.”
“Genden’s encomiums on you, Knucker.” Having finished dressing, Simna sat down on the edge of the bed and resumed eating. “I take back what I said about you last night. But you probably don’t remember much of that.”
“On the contrary, I remember all of it. I have an exceedingly good memory—when it’s functioning.”
“Then you don’t mind that we picked your pocket to pay for this room and food?” The unrepentant swordsman bit down into a final muffin.
“Not at all. I’d only have squandered the money on spirituous intoxicants. Far better it be used for sustenance and shelter. I owe you more, much more, than a night’s rest.”
His words muffled by muffin, Simna gestured at the other man with the crumbly residue. “Hoy, I’ll second that!”
“And I would like to repay you further.” Knucker smiled apologetically. “Unfortunately, all the money I had in the world was in my pocket. As you can imagine, I have had more than a little difficulty obtaining any kind of paying work lately.”
“How did you come by that money, then?” Ehomba asked him.
Their guest lowered his gaze. “I would do anything for a drink, or for a few coins to purchase it. Please don’t make me repeat the details. My condition was degrading enough. How far I debased myself to achieve that state of utter wretchedness need not concern you.” Determination in his voice, he lifted his eyes. “I will repay you for your kindness by guiding you safely out of Phan by the quickest and easiest route. I do not know where you are headed from here.”
“North by northwest,” the herdsman told him simply.
Eagerness shining from his freshly scrubbed face, the little man nodded vigorously. “You will first have to pass through Bondressey. I know that country well and can greatly expedite your passage. I have even been to the foot of Mount Scathe, in the Hrugar Mountains, and can guide you at least that far.” He looked anxiously from one man to the other. “What say you?”
Simna shrugged and jerked a thumb in the herdsman’s direction. “This be the sorcerer’s party. I’m just hanging around, kind of like unplanned baggage.”
Knucker’s eyes widened slightly as he turned to gaze at Ehomba. “Are you really a sorcerer?”
“No,” the herdsman replied tersely. He threw a sour look in Simna’s direction, but the herdsman had returned his full attention to the remaining ruins of his morning meal. “I am a keeper of cattle and sheep.” A sudden thought made him frown. “But you already know what I am. You know everything.”
The little man looked baffled. “Me? Know everything? What are you talking about? I know only myself, and the places I have been, and the bits and pieces of a normal life. How would I know whether you are a sorcerer or not?”
Simna was nodding slowly. “Exactly what I’ve been saying all along.”
Ehomba’s gaze narrowed as he stared hard at the speaker. If Knucker was, for whatever unknown reasons of his own, playing out a game behind a mask of feigned ignorance, he was performing like a professional. His expression as he returned the herdsman’s gaze was all innocence and sincerity.
“What,” he asked the other man slowly, “is the meaning of life?”
Struck dumb by this searching profundity, Knucker looked to Simna for assistance or an explanation. Neither was forthcoming. The little man turned back to Ehomba. “Do you expect me to answer that?”
“You did last night. And very well, too.”
Knucker could only stand and shake his head in disbelief. “If I did, then I remember nothing of what was said.”
“Name my two aunts,” Simna challenged him. He was enjoying Ehomba’s discomfiture.
This time their guest essayed a tiny, nervous laugh. “How could I do that? I know nothing of your family. I didn’t even know you had aunts, or their number. Far less do I know their names.” His brow wrinkled. “But I do remember something.”
“Ah,” Ehomba murmured expectantly. Simna looked uncertain.
“I remember that others have put such questions to me when I was in another of my rare periods of extended sobriety. I could not answer their questions either, and was bewildered that they would ask such things of me. I was amazed to think that they would believe anyone could answer such queries.”
“Anyone indeed,” Simna exclaimed, once more on top of the proverbial analytical heap.
“I think I understand.” The herdsman rose from the couch against which he was sitting. “When you are clean and sober like this, you remember the normal things that go to make up a life. When you are drunk, you forget them—but know everything else. Truly, what a strange and capricious gift.”
“If what you say is true, then it is not a gift but a curse,” Knucker responded tightly. “Why can I not retain even a little of this knowing when I am rational enough to make use of it?”
“That I do not know.” Ehomba began to check his pack. It was time to go. “But this I do know: From what we saw of you last night, you are far, far better off ignorant and sober than intoxicated and all-knowing.” He smiled encouragingly. “In consequence of your having raised yourself up, we will allow you to guide us through Bondressey and as far as the Hrugar Mountains. Any help that speeds our journey is most welcome.”
“Gryeorg knows that’s true.” Simna was shoving the last of the breakfast bread into his pack. “The sooner we reach the end, the quicker I’ll have my hands on my share of the treasure.”
“Treasure?” Once more, the little man looked mystified.
Ehomba pulled his pack up onto his shoulders and set about adjusting the straps. “My good friend Simna is brave and clever, but prone to delusion. In addition to believing that I am some sort of sorcerer, he is convinced that among other things I seek a great treasure. In truth, it exists only in his mind’s eye.”
“That’s me.” Simna made the announcement cheerfully as he ambled around the bed while fussing with his pack. Passing Knucker, he leaned close to whisper urgently. “He says I’m clever, and that I am. Clever enough to see through the denials he’s forever prattling to me and everyone we meet. Don’t you doubt it, bruther—he’s a wizard on the trail of treasure. And I aim to get my share.” He nudged the little man in his all-too-prominent ribs. “Who knows? If you play your ‘predictions’ right and can convince him to let you stick with us, you might come in for a share yourself.”
“But I can’t make any predictions unless I’m moribund drunk, and when I’m that badly under I don’t know what I’m saying, much less what I’m hearing.” He drew himself up to his full, if unassuming, height. “Besides, I’m through with drinking myself into stupefaction! Better an ordinary man sober than a seer stinking of debasement.”
“A wise choice.” Ehomba was straightforwardly encouraging. “That decision will make your company as welcome as your experience of the territory that lies ahead of us. It will be good to have a knowledgeable guide along, and not to have to ask one stranger after another which road is the safest to take, which route the easiest.”
“I’ll do everything I can,” the reborn Knucker assured him. Less confidently, he turned to the black litah. Remaining bone snapped explosively beneath the big cat’s powerful jaws. “I will even do all that is in my power to help you, most remarkable of all predators.”
Languorously indifferent, Ahlitah turned his head to scrutinize the wavering speaker. “I despise you, you know.”
“I—I’m sorry, great maned one. What have I done to so offend you?”
“Nothing.” The cat returned to the last of its chomping. “I despise the other two as well. I despise all humans. You are weak, and unattractive, and conflicted within. Not only that, the most robust of your males can make love only a few times a day.” He sniffed contemptuously through his whiskers. “Whereas the lion in me can—”
“Hoy, hoy,” Simna interrupted, “enough! We’ve heard all that boasting. But can you make a sword, or tie a fishing line?”
Supercilious brows aimed at the swordsman. Thick black lip
s drew back to reveal gleaming teeth, and claws longer than a man’s fingers sprang from their place of concealment within a massive forepaw. Alarmed, the timorous Knucker drew back.
“Here are my swords,” the litah growled, “and here my fishing line.”
“Stop it, you two.” When he wanted to, Ehomba could growl smartly himself. “It is time to go.”
“Hoy,” the swordsman agreed. “Let’s be away from here while my belly’s still full and my temperament under control.” He started toward the door.
Rising from his corner, Ahlitah padded after him, brushing against the apprehensive Knucker without so much as glancing in the little man’s direction. As he passed Ehomba, however, the ebon hulk snarled softly.
“One day I will have to kill that insufferable windbag. Then I will butcher him like a fat young kudu and eat him, starting with his tongue.”
“That is between you and Simna.” Ehomba was blissfully indifferent. “But mindful of your promise to me, you will not do so until I have finished what I have come all this way to accomplish.”
The great maned head turned to face the herdsman. So close were they that Ehomba could feel the litah’s breath on his skin. It was pungent with the bone of dead ox. “You are more fortunate than you know, man, that among cats the code of honor is stronger than it is among humans.”
Ehomba nodded his head ever so slightly. “I envy your character as much as your staying power.”
The litah grunted its satisfaction. “At least you, Etjole Ehomba, recognize that which is greater than you, and respect that which you yourself cannot achieve.”
“Oh, I did not mean that,” the tall southerner responded frankly. “By staying power, I meant your determination to remain with me.” So saying, he followed the swordsman out the open door.
Ahlitah hesitated, pondering hard on the herdsman’s words. Left behind, the little man looked on curiously. He had seen many things, but never before had he seen a cat pondering hard. Then the big carnivore emitted a series of short, pithy yowls, which, if Knucker had not known better, he might well have mistaken for laughter.
Into the Thinking Kingdoms: Journeys of the Catechist, Book 2 Page 21