by Tad Williams
He raised an eyebrow as if he suspected her motives, but said only, "Yes, but then I would like to go look for Renie again, in case new people have come in while we were sleeping." He looked out at the Well. "In fact, this place does bring another story to my mind—one of the greatest of my people's tales."
"Chizz," she said. "What's it about?"
"It is another story of Grandfather Mantis, about how the moon came to be in the sky . . . and about other things. You will see why I cannot help thinking of it in this place, beside this hole in the ground full of stars swimming in the waters of creation."
"The waters of. . . . Do you really think that's what it is?"
"I do not know, but to me it looks like the pictures I have seen in the city-school where I studied, pictures taken through the eyes of telescopes looking far away out into space—and back in time, too, as they explained to me, since the light itself was old when it reached us. To me this Well looks like a place where universes are born."
Sam felt a little shiver. She could not help wondering what it would be like to drown in that deep hole, to gasp out your last breath even as galaxies of light swirled around you. "Scanny," she said quietly.
!Xabbu smiled. "But the stories of my people are seldom of great things, of wars or stars or the creation of universes—or even if they are, they are spoken of in a small way. We are a small people, you see. We step very softly, and when we die, the wind soon has blown our footprints away. Even Grandfather Mantis, who once stole fire from beneath Ostrich's wing to give to his people so they would not fear the dark—yes, even Mantis, the greatest of us all, is only a tiny insect. But he is a person, too. All things in those first days were people." He nodded, eyes closed as he composed his thoughts, "This story starts with a very small thing indeed, as you shall see. A piece of leather.
"One day Grandfather Mantis was out walking, and discovered a piece of leather beside the trail. It was a piece from the shoe—you would call it a sandal, I think—that belonged to Rainbow, his own son. It had broken loose and been left, forgotten. But something about the shoe-piece called to Grandfather Mantis. Something about it seized his attention, this tiny, discarded thing, and he picked it up and carried it with him."
As !Xabbu spoke, his preoccupation and sadness dropped away. His voice rose, his hands fluttered into the air like startled birds. Sam saw that more refugees were moving toward them, drawn by his animation in this quiet, sad place.
"Mantis came to a pool of water," !Xabbu said, "a place where reeds grew all around, a hidden, fertile place, and he put the shoe-piece in the water—it was almost as if a dream had come to him and commanded it, but he was not asleep and he had not dreamed.
"Grandfather Mantis went away then, but he could not forget about it. At last he came back to the pool and called out, 'Rainbow's shoe-piece! Rainbow's shoe-piece! Where are you?' "
"But in the water the shoe-piece had become a tiny eland. Now, if you do not know it, to my people the eland is the greatest of the antelopes. My own father hunted one so long and so desperately that he followed it out of the desert which was the only world he knew and stumbled into the river delta of my mother's people. And Grandfather Mantis himself, it is said, when he wished to travel in dignity and power, would ride between the antlers of a great eland."
!Xabbu showed the proud stride of the eland in a sort of dance, head held high, so that Sam could almost see antlers worn like a crown. The throng of refugees was growing around them, several rows deep across the headland. Wide eyes watched the little man avidly, but !Xabbu did not seem to notice his swelling audience.
"But this eland in the pool was not great and powerful. It was small, wet, and shivering, so new that seeing it brought tears to the eyes of Grandfather Mantis. He sang a song of praise and gratitude but he did not touch it, for it was still too small and weak. Instead he went away, but when he came back he found small hoofprints in the earth beside the pool and he was so full of joy he danced. The eland saw him then and came to him as though he were completely its father. Mantis then brought honey, dark, sweet, and sacred, and rubbed it onto the little eland's ribs so it would become strong.
"Each night he returned to the pool and his eland. Each night he sang to it, and danced, and rubbed it with sweet honey. Then at last he knew he must go away and wait to see if the young eland would grow. Three days he stayed away from the pool, and three nights also, though his heart was very sore. When he returned on the morning after the third night, the eland walked out of the water in the light of the sun, its hooves clicking. It had grown to magnificent size, and Grandfather Mantis was so delighted he shouted out, 'Look, a person is coming! Ha! Rainbow's shoe-piece is coming!' For he felt that he had created the living creature from Rainbow's discarded piece of leather.
"But Rainbow and his sons, Mongoose and Younger Rainbow, were not happy when they heard what Mantis had done. 'He thinks to fool us with his stories,' they told each other, 'and keep the meat to himself. Everyone knows that old Mantis is a trickster.' So they went to the pool and found the young eland grazing on the bank. They surrounded it and killed it with their spears. They were very excited—it was a fine, big eland—and began to laugh and sing as they cut it up.
"Grandfather Mantis was coming to the pool when he heard their voices. He hid in the bushes and watched them, and soon came to realize what had happened. He was full of anger and sorrow, not just because they had killed his eland, but because they had not shared it with him, and had done everything without ceremony or even a dance of gratitude. He was afraid of them, though, because they were three and he was but one, so he waited in the reeds until they left, still laughing and singing as they carried away the meat from their kill, wrapped up in its own skin.
"Mantis came out of the reeds and walked to the place where the eland had died. Rainbow and the two grandsons of Grandfather Mantis had left only one thing behind, one of the organs from the eland's stomach, that which contained the black, bitter gall that not even my people, though schooled by need to eat almost anything, can swallow. They had left the gall hanging on a bush. Mantis was so sad and angry that he took his spear and hit the organ sack. From inside it the gall spoke to him, saying 'Do not strike me.'
"Mantis became even more angry. 'I will strike you if I wish,' he said. 'I will throw you down on the ground and step on you. I will stab you with my spear.'
"The gall spoke to him again, saying 'If you do, I will come out and cover you in with my darkness.'
"But Grandfather Mantis was too angry to listen. He lifted his spear and stabbed the organ. The gall came out as it had threatened, bitter, dark as a night without stars. and it covered Mantis in, even flowing into his eyes so that he was blinded.
"Mantis threw himself down on the ground, crying, 'Help me! I cannot see! The black gall has covered my eyes and I feel myself to be lost!' But no one heard him calling in that remote place by the pool, and no one came to help him. Mantis could only crawl along the ground, feeling his way, blind and helpless. 'Hyena will find me this way,' he thought, 'or some other hungry creature, and I will be killed. Grandfather Mantis will be dead—will that not be a sad thing?'
"But no one came to help him and he could only crawl on through the darkness. Then at last, just as he became so tired and fearful he could not move any farther, he put his hand down upon something. It was an ostrich feather, white as smoke, bright as a flame, and the heart of Grandfather Mantis was filled with hope. He took the feather and wiped the black gall from his eyes. When he could see the beauty of the world again, he took the feather and wiped off the rest of the bitter gall, which fell away, leaving the feather clean and untouched. Marveling at this wondrous thing, delighted with his escape, Grandfather Mantis threw the feather high into the sky where it stuck, a curve of white against a darkness as black as the gall. He danced and sang. 'You now lie up in the sky,' Mantis told the feather. 'From this day, you will be the moon, and you will shine at night and give light to all the people when there would ot
herwise be darkness. You are the moon, you will live, you will fall away, then you will live again and give light to all the people.' And it did. And it does."
!Xabbu fell silent, lowering his head as if saying "Amen" at the end of a prayer, Sam could not help noticing all the faces surrounding them in the unending twilight—childlike, expectant faces. The. crowd had grown larger still, pressing in like victims of a disaster pleading for information, until they surrounded the small knoll many rows deep.
She thought she should thank him for the story, although she felt again that she hadn't really understood—what was all that about some icky black fenfen getting all over the insect the story was about? And how could he be an insect but have a rainbow for a son? Also, she was puzzled why one kind of story, about making an antelope out of a sandal, had suddenly turned into another kind of story: it violated her sense of how stories were supposed to work. But she knew that these things were somehow important to !Xabbu, sort of like a religion, and she didn't want to offend anyone she liked so much.
A high-pitched voice called from the largely silent crowd. "Tell another!"
!Xabbu looked up, a little startled, but before he or Sam could make out where the request had originated, others were also asking, a growing chorus.
"A story!"
"Tell another."
"Please!"
"They want to hear more stories," !Xabbu said wonderingly.
"They're scared," said Sam. "The world is coming to an end. And they're all children, aren't they?" Looking around at the pleading, terrified faces, she felt herself fighting back tears. If Jongleur had been within reach she would have hit him, would have tried to knock him down and make him pay for what his cruel self-obsession had done to these innocents. "They have to be them," she said, as much to herself as to !Xabbu. "They have to be the stolen children."
She was arrested by a familiar face in the throng, although it took her a moment to remember where she had seen the handsome, dark-haired man before. He was a few rows back in me crowd, holding a bundle Sam couldn't quite see, watching !Xabbu with an unblinking, almost vacant stare. None of the fairy-tale children stood too near him, as though they could sense something wrong.
Sam pulled at !Xabbu's arm. "Look, it's that Grail guy—the one that disappeared when Renie disappeared!"
"Ricardo Klement? Where?"
"Over there," Sam said, but now there was only an empty space where Klement had stood. "He was there a second ago, no dupping!"
As they scanned the throng of refugees, Sam became aware of someone standing very close to her, a small child apparently made of mud. She tried to step around the tiny obstacle but the child moved with her and reached up a stubby hand to tug at Sam's Gypsy finery.
"He is not there now," !Xabbu said. "He is larger than most of these people—we would see him, I think. . . ."
"He couldn't have got away that fast," Sam said angrily. Beyond the crowd of refugees still begging for another story, the gray slope was empty for dozens of meters. "Not without us seeing him." The mud child was still trying to get her attention. "Stop pulling on me, will you?" Sam snapped.
The child let go and took a step backward. It was hard to tell from its odd face, the features little more than dents and grooves, what the creature was thinking, but it squared its shoulders in a way that clearly said it would not be chased off. "I want to talk to you," the stranger said in the voice of a little girl.
Sam sighed. "What?"
"Are you. . . . are you Renie's friends?"
Sam had been expecting a plea for another of !Xabbu's tales, and for a long moment could only stare at the child, dumbfounded. "Renie. . . ?"
!Xabbu was there in a heartbeat to kneel beside the child. "Who are you?" he asked. "Do you know Renie? Do you know where she is? Yes, we are her friends."
The girl looked at him for a moment. "I'm . . . I'm the Stone Girl." Her simple finger-stroke of a mouth writhed and she began to cry. "Don't you know where she is either?"
From the way he closed his eyes and grunted, like a man suffering a painful blow, Sam could see !Xabbu's terrible disappointment. "Maybe you'd better just tell us everything," she said to the weeping Stone Girl.
". . . And then after we ran away from the Ticks, up the hill, we crossed the bridge." The child was still sniffling a bit, but in telling the story of her travels with Renie she had found a sort of calm. "And we saw the strange man who was her friend, too, but he was just walking, and the Ticks went around him!" She was clearly impressed. "Like they didn't even care about him."
"That's so scanny!" Sam said. "That has to be what's-his-name, Klement."
!Xabbu frowned. "And then what happened? When you crossed the bridge?"
The Stone Girl chewed for a moment on a muddy finger, thinking. "We didn't really go to Jinnear Bad House, not like usual. We both went in, sort of, then right away I came out here at the Well. But Renie didn't." Her eyes squinted for a moment as she fought more tears. "Do you think she's all right?"
"We utterly hope so," Sam said, then turned to !Xabbu, "But where is she?"
The small man had a distant, disturbed look on his face. "The rest of us traveled in a similar way, I think. We came close to the Other, were weighed—judged, perhaps—and then were sent away. Those who belong in this world, like Azador and this little girl, did not even experience that much, but were simply sent straight here."
"What does that mean?"
He stood, absently patting the Stone Girl on the head, but he looked as miserable as she had ever seen him. "It might be I am wrong, but I think Renie was allowed in."
"Allowed in?" Sam was not following.
"To the Well." !Xabbu turned to look at the crater and its sea of restless light. "I think she is in the Other's innermost heart."
"Oh, no," Sam said. "God, really?"
!Xabbu's smile, for the first time in Sam's memory, was something unpleasant to look at. "Yes, God, really. The god of this place, anyway. The dying, crazy god."
Sam's pulse was rabbiting. She had all but forgotten the Stone Girl who still stood between them face puzzled and sad. "!Xabbu, what will we do?"
"What I will do is go after her." He was staring at the Well as though seeing it for the first time. Sam could not help remembering how afraid he had been just to dive into a placid river. "I . . . I will go down."
"Not without me you won't." For the moment, her fear of being left behind allowed her to ignore the terror of the unnatural Well. "I already told you what I think about all that let-me-save-the-day fenfen."
He shook his head. "You do not understand, Sam. The Other—I believe it already has rejected me once, rejected you too, all of us." His voice had gotten very quiet. "I do not believe I will reach Renie, but I have to try." He turned to her, almost pleading. "I cannot take you, Sam, when I feel sure there is no hope."
She was just about to issue an angry rebuttal when she finally realized that an irritating noise which had been in the background for several seconds was Felix Jongleur's loud, angry voice. She turned and saw the old man on open ground midway between the place where she stood with !Xabbu and the outskirts of the Gypsy camp.
". . . But I do not believe that anymore. I think your silence is insolence—or worse."
The person he was shouting at was Ricardo Klement.
!Xabbu was already hurrying down the slope. Sam took a few steps, then turned, startled by a cry of unhappiness behind her. She had forgotten the Stone Girl.
"Come on," Sam said. "Do you want me to carry you?" The Stone Girl shook her head stiffly, but reached out and took Sam's hand in a cool and surprisingly firm grip.
By the time they reached the others, !Xabbu was doing his best to ask Klement a question about Renie, but Felix Jongleur was full of cold fury and would not be interrupted. Sam could finally see the thing Klement was holding and she was shocked and disgusted. The infant shape and vestigial features made a bad combination with its muddy gray-blue color.
"So you will not even a
nswer me?" Jongleur asked Klement. "Come, I thought you were my ally, Ricardo—I have made many sacrifices for you. Yet you disappear when we are all in need, then will not even tell me where you have gone? And I suppose you will not explain your little . . . souvenir either?"
For a moment Klement almost seemed to clutch the little baby-creature tighter, a gesture that was the first human thing Sam had seen from the man. "It . . . is mine."
"Just tell me what you have been doing," Jongleur demanded.
"Waiting," said Klement after a long pause.
"For what?"
"For . . . something." Klement slowly turned toward the Well, then back to Jongleur, !Xabbu, and Sam. "And now . . . I have found it."
An instant later, Ricardo Klement was gone.
Sam stared helplessly at the empty space, then turned to !Xabbu, half-believing that something must be wrong with her. Her friend looked just as surprised, but his astonishment was as nothing to Jongleur's, who looked like a man who had just seen his own furniture rise up and attack him.
"What. . . ?" he said, gaping. "How. . . ?"
Even as he spoke, the universe shifted and reality stuttered to a halt. Sam had not felt anything like it for many days, and had almost forgotten the terror of one of these hitches in time and space. Color and noise blurred into a mishmash of sensory information. Sam felt sure that the end had finally come, the crash of the system, and even tried to brace herself for a return of the hideous, bone-drilling pain she had experienced when she had once before been yanked out of the Grail Network. Instead the meaningless chaos of sight and sound abruptly knitted itself back together, as if someone had wound a key and set a clockwork mechanism moving forward again. Reality was restored. Or most of it was.
The Stone Girl was tugging at Sam's arm, but Sam could hardly see her or anything else because the light that had come back was much dimmer, as though the entire virtual universe were powered by a single spluttering, ancient generator. The shapes around her were little more than shadows, but she could hear a rising murmur of terror from the refugees crowded around the Well, a sound like wind in tall trees.