The Glass Mountains

by Cynthia Kadohata

  Artie’s paw groped at my face and roused me. Over and over again he started sticking his weak paw on my face and in my mouth. At first I thought he was trying to tell me of his great hunger, but then I realized what he really wanted: He wanted the meat on his bones to feed me. And with that frightening thought the hot shimmering light disappeared, and I was back in the dark cave, enveloped in cool close air and huddling against the warm body of my dog, our stomachs crying out for food. I listened to the cries until I grew faint. Then I got up and desperately dragged Artie through the cave.

  When I grew tired I lay on him and felt his comforting breath lift my head up and down. But as my mind wandered I suddenly realized that he had stopped breathing.

  “No!” I cried out. I crazily stuck my own hand in his mouth and then jumped up and dragged him some more and kept dragging until I collapsed. He had lost his life. For the first time in my life I sobbed, wasting the water in my body for tears and then desperately licking my tears to retrieve the water. I decided to die here with Artie. First I would give him a proper ritual. I groped around for stones and pebbles that I formed into a circle around him.

  I passed the “night” in the soundless dark, frightened by the tiny sounds I imagined I heard, and felt so scared of being in the open that I again craved to return to my hole. When I couldn’t fall asleep I took two stones and with them played the first simple rhythms I’d learned as a child. The rhythms lulled me as much as I could be lulled, and finally I fell asleep.

  When I woke, I considered dragging Artie’s body back to the crevice, where at least he might have company. But it was so dark I could not be sure that I might not fall in myself. And I couldn’t part with my dog. Nor, I found, could I stop when I possessed the energy to go forward. So I dragged him with me, feeling along the wall and going along the narrow tunnel. I walked until Artie’s body began to stiffen, and I dragged him still. All this insanity seemed not dreamlike but intensely real.

  I had got used to a sickly fear that pervaded this tunnel and realized a person could get used to anything. But once, when I woke after a nap, I saw above me a tiny prick of light. I hadn’t seen it earlier—it must have been nighttime out. Suddenly I realized that the air was a bit fresher here, and the fear I felt less acute.

  No matter how hard I tried, however, I couldn’t find a way to climb up toward that hole. Even if I could have, I don’t know what I would have done next. It was just that the prick of light drew me to it with its beauty and promise. Reluctant though I was to leave it, I knew I mustn’t stop. I had no idea where I might escape, and I didn’t want to risk falling to fatigue or starvation if I chanced to be only a day or two from escape. Every time I lay down I stared all around me, searching for another prick of light. When I didn’t see any others I wondered whether I’d imagined the light, just as even now I sometimes imagined for a moment that here or there I saw light.

  Slowly, I became aware of something, a thin, fine smell that wove itself through the stuffiness. The smell, which I couldn’t place, seemed ravishing in its beauty. I felt intoxicated. There was almost no time left for me now. After every interlude of sleep it had become harder and harder to rise and to move. But this new smell energized me. I followed it until I grew dizzy with its beauty. I could place it now. It was the scent of fresh air, with bits of trees, with dirt, with animals and rocks and clouds all mixed into its lovely brew. Finally it grew so strong I stumbled forward as fast as I could, dragging Artie’s corpse. I closed my eyes to concentrate on the smell, so that no other sense but that of smell guided me. When I suddenly reached my destination all my other senses were stunned by what they found. I was outside.

  I suppose it was all nothing special, just a dry canyon with a few trees, a sputtering string of a river, and an overcast early evening sky. But I lay down and rubbed my face in the dirt and slurped at the string of a river. I put handfuls of dirt in my mouth and chewed and smelled and felt the texture of life on my tongue. I happily spit out the dirt and started to wash out my mouth in the trickle of muddy water.

  So my face was dirty and my mouth full of muck when I met a man I thought at first might be the guide my grandfather had spoken of. But he was the opposite of a guide.

  He was a plain smooth-faced man hovering over the bodies of my mother and Moor, both of them unconscious, maybe dead, Moor bleeding from a bandage on his back.

  “Are they alive?” I ran over and found them both bleeding.

  “Are they your friends?”

  “Yes, we were together in the caves.”

  “I happened upon them,” he said calmly. “The caves are dangerous. You shouldn’t go in them.”

  “We were chased.”

  “Ah.” He half smiled.

  “How long have they been here?”

  “How can I know? I myself have been here only a short while. I bandaged the boy, poor thing, he’s lost so much blood.” His mild gaze fell upon Artie. “I believe your dog is dead.”

  “I know,” I said angrily. “Don’t you have any ointments or something for them?”

  “I’m a fisherman. But I have already given them some juices that will help. You must feed them some meat.” He nodded so subtly toward Artie that I was not sure he had nodded at all.

  Both Moor and my mother had become skeletal, and both mumbled in their sleep. I started a fire and cooked some roots and could not stop myself from looking Artie’s way. He had been the most magnificent dog that ever lived. He had not died from starvation but from a mix of despondency, hunger, and, perhaps, a desire to provide me with food. I asked forgiveness and impaled him with a branch that I suspended over my fire to cook. The smell of this food roused Moor somewhat. When my dog was cooked I chewed his meat and put part of what I had chewed into Moor’s mouth, part into my mother’s.

  And in this way I saved my mother and my beloved from starvation.

  They didn’t quite wake up that evening, but I could see they were improving. My new companion sat up agreeably on a rock all night, not sleeping at all so far as I could see. Whenever I attempted conversation, he answered agreeably that I was quite right.

  I passed a night as quiet as the day and in the morning woke before sunrise. My companion had already started a fire and begun cooking some roots. As he ate he stuffed his cheeks so full they both stuck out in humps that he chewed down in quick little bites. Every so often he would rapidly spit out bits of food that apparently were hard to chew.

  The sun rose at the horizon. I was staring at the sun, just finishing up my roots, when I heard a snore and saw the man sitting upright with his eyes closed.

  I cleaned up the breakfast remains and waited for further improvement from Moor and my mother.

  2

  “Did you clean up?” was the first thing the Hathatu-me man said upon waking. “I’m very tidy myself. Of course if you didn’t want to clean up, that would be fine, too.”

  “I cleaned up.”

  He stood up and threw dried bugs into his mouth, a whole handful, and he spit out the shells with dazzling rapidity. I watched with amazement as the shells flew out one after the other.

  “That’s quite a trick,” I said.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “How come the Formans haven’t overrun your country? At least there’s a little water here, and greenery.”

  “Oh, we pay them their money and that satisfies them.”

  “The Bakshami should have paid them as well.”

  “Bakshami is no longer.”

  “Then it’s true the hotlands have been overtaken?”

  “So it is said.”

  “And the people?”

  He shrugged. I felt no more sadness, just anger, at the Formans, at these passive Hathatu-me, and at my own people. The world had changed, and they had not possessed the will even to try to protect themselves.

  “Do you think Forma will attack Hathatu-me despite the payments?”

  “They likely will.”

  “And you take it so calmly?”
r />   “No more calmly than your people did, I believe.”

  “But look what happened to us!”

  “Like you, we are not a fighting people.”

  “But you must learn to become so if you will survive.”

  “Perhaps we won’t survive.”

  “But how can you accept that so easily?”

  “No more easily than your people did.”

  We didn’t speak for a while. Then my companion glanced up at the sun. “I must go soon.” He looked at me with the mildest curiosity. “What happened to the three of you in there?”

  “Chased by Formans,” I said.

  He smiled serenely, an ordinary man with a simple, almost substanceless, manner except for an ever-present serenity. “That happened to a friend of mine once. The Formans are a strange lot.”

  “You were born in Hathatu-me?”

  He smiled and bowed his head somewhat.

  “The Formans say they own you.”

  “No human has an owner.”

  “You’re too optimistic. Many of them own and are owned.”

  He smiled agreeably. “Perhaps you’re right after all.”

  “If you were a slave you would know it’s so.”

  “I shall dwell on that.”

  “Do you not hate the Formans?”

  “My hatred wouldn’t make much difference, that much is certain.”

  “I’ve never met such an opinionless man,” I said.

  “Perhaps you’re right in what you say. Of course there is always the chance that you are wrong.”

  His mere presence began to make me want to take a nap. I fell asleep and awoke to see him gazing mildly at me as he stood ready to leave. “Your friends are recovering,” he said. He pulled me up with a gentle but firm force, and took my hands. Up above I heard a familiar whirring, and when I gazed up saw several Forman ships flying overhead.

  “It’s beginning,” he said. To my surprise, he began weeping silently. Strings of liquid poured out of his nose. “You must get back now. I wish you luck. Take good care of your friend. He is Soom Kali. The Soom Kali have my fate in their hands. If they should lose the upcoming war...”

  “But where are you going?”

  “I must get home to see my family.” He rushed off, crashing through the brush until he disappeared.

  As I ministered to my mother and Moor, I could not understand that Hathatu-me man and his mild ways. The Formans might be about to take over his land, and he had no intention of fighting, no intention of trying to save his sector as the Soom Kali would soon need to fight to save theirs, and, indirectly, his as well. A great war lay before the planet. Moor and I must return to Soom Kali to persuade a jury not to kill him for the death of his soldier friend; then we could live there and fight there, for ourselves and for the child that I now felt growing inside me. I did not know who among my family had lived and who had died. I did not know whether the Glass Mountains still rose majestically above the sand or whether they now lay in ruins under the sun.

  Two days later Moor opened his eyes. We didn’t speak, just smiled and touched. I lay next to him, and we slept together. A few hours later I awoke to see him cooking at a fire.

  “You should rest,” I said.

  “There is no rest for a Soom Kali man in war.”

  “There is no war.”

  He peered above, and we saw a fleet of Forman ships speed past. We hugged and watched the ships pass. Then Moor returned to his cooking.

  “We must revive your mother and move on.”

  I crouched beside my mother, whose eyes remained closed. But color had come into her cheeks.

  “I don’t know what her life will be like without my father. She may not want to live.”

  “She will have to make that decision herself.”

  Two days later, as I lay beside her staring into her face, her eyelids fluttered and opened.

  “Moor!” I said. Moor and I leaned over my mother.

  She glared at us with eyes that held something I had never seen in them before. So strange was her expression that it took me a while to realize what her look meant.

  “You hate me!” I said. But then the expression faded and she closed her eyes and slept fitfully.

  Moor told me they had taken a different tunnel to the outside. In their tunnel, they’d been attacked repeatedly. In the end, Moor said, it was my mother who had saved him, by killing their last attacker with Moor’s own knife.

  “Why does she hate me?” I said.

  He was silent.

  When my mother was strong enough, we traveled into a nearby town, where we easily found a Hathatu-me ship that would take us back to Soom Kali. In fact, the Hathatu-me were so mild and agreeable, I think we would have been able to find a ship to take us to one of the moons and back if only we had asked.

  The driver of our ship was as agreeable as the man I’d met outside the caves. Nowhere did I find the guidance my grandfather had promised me. The time for predictions had passed, just as seasons passed in other sectors. And now the season of war had arrived.

  At my request, we flew over my barren homeland. My heart soared as I saw the Glass Mountains shining, way in the distance. I was raised for peace, but found myself surprisingly impatient to defend those mountains and whatever was left of Bakshami.

  When we reached Soom Kali, we found the entire populace preparing for war. Even Moor’s sickly father had been recruited to help manufacture weapons. All trials had been suspended—no Soom Kali would be put to death when every body was needed for the war.

  The strip of barren land through which I’d once passed was now peopled with Bakshami refugees learning to fight. Among the students were Jobei and Leisha, who had left the Glass Mountains not long after I had. They had decided that the only way to save the great mountains was to leave them and learn to fight. Among their teachers was Moor’s friend Panyor, with whom Tarkahna had mated. And another couple I knew lived there: Ansmeea the Young and my former betrothed, Sennim. They were married now.

  Every day I took classes on the art of soldiering. What I learned in my hand-to-hand battle classes was that falling was a type of magical enterprise for me. As I hurled through the air about to land it was almost as if I could calculate the movements of each of my muscles and project which combination of movements would cause which kind of landing. Strangely, those moments in the air, a time of fearful anticipation for most students, were a time of great joy for me. Sometimes I suspected that the teachers picked on me often—hurling me up and across and down, forward and backward and around—just so they could watch me fall. I felt my babies—twins—inside of me as I twirled through the air. And always I landed with grace. After watching my brilliant falls, the Soom Kali teachers would compliment me lavishly, the way they did with only their most prized students. Moor would flush with pride.

  My brother Jobei could not keep up in class. He had aged astonishingly. His small rotted face shocked me, and he had begun to hunch his shoulders as if they burdened him. His legs were as thin as the sticks we’d once played together. And yet, in his stick-like legs, sloping back, and decimated face I saw an even greater nobility than I’d seen in him before. If I tried to judge him as someone still alive, he appeared ugly and small, but if I saw him as one half-dead, he appeared noble and great, a man who had given his life force to kindness and generosity. And I knew that, in honor of him, it was proper that I should look upon my own brother as half-dead.

  Panyor contacted Maruk and Sian, now fully integrated, but they refused to move to our strip of land. Maruk and Sian had children, and both my brother and his wife had joined the army and received new promotions recently. They didn’t want to give up their thriving military careers to move to a forsaken strip of land to be with me. Apparently the generals made great favorites of them.

  I spoke with Maruk only once, and he seemed as proud, daring, and kind as he had when we were children and I’d admired him so much. He looked like an adventurer, smaller than many Soom Kali but
nevertheless large enough, and as handsome as any soldier in the sector. But pretending to be who he was not had made him a Soom Kali. His Bakshami childhood was forgotten. It was like with the romance ritual. He’d pretended to be Soom Kali, and to protect himself and his children, strove to make the pretense real. Being a man of great resources and determination, he’d succeeded. I couldn’t help respecting the way he’d invented himself. Very few could have accomplished what he had. But in the process he’d become more like a Soom Kali soldier than many of the real Soom Kali soldiers I met.

  “I would hope that your family could join mine in this strip of land,” I said.

  He looked at me with the old love in his eyes. “I would still die for you,” he said. “But if you could know how great was our struggle at first, to live here and worry constantly of not integrating successfully. If you could know that, you would also know with what relief I wake up every day now, when I realize that in truth I am Soom Kali. I have become Soom Kali. It would not be possible for me even to remember the rhythms I once knew by heart because I am no longer what I was.”

  As he spoke these last words I was ever to hear him speak, I saw a flash of the old, kind Maruk, the Maruk who’d protected me all through my childhood and who I would have died for. I still would have died for him. But he would not have wanted it so. And so the brother I’d once venerated left my life forever. That night I played rhythms for him as if he had died. I had no brothers left.