Man of Two Worlds
Page 15
“We have a brother, too,” said William Douglas, “but we don’t know where he is. We think the Statists have killed him.”
Ketan stood looking from one to the other. He tried to catch something of the bond that was between them and failed. Cut he knew the surging loneliness that he had always known in Kronweld, the impenetrable wall that seemed to exist there between everyone but companions. And now he thought lie saw why it existed.
“Sister,” he said slowly. ‘“Brother —Father, Mother—” He repeated the words he had heard like a child learning them for the first time. And the unfamiliar sentiments he faintly glimpsed attached to them were overwhelming. Kronweld, with all the fine beauty and excellence of its Seeking was more barren than the forest of villages of the Illegitimates.
There were horses, which Ketan had not seen before, saddled and waiting when he arose the following morning. The sight of William Douglas astride one seemed ludicrous, but he had to admit it was a utilization of animals that had not occurred to him in Kronweld. He doubted, however, that it would be very practicable to ride the Bors.
As he approached the animal he was to ride he doubted also the practicability of his riding a horse. Dubiously, he mounted with the aid of John Edwards.
Besides the three animals they rode, there were three that carried packs of supplies only.
The first globe, or sun, as Ketan was trying to accustom himself to calling it, was not yet above the horizon, but the sky was palely light. There was a sharpness and brilliance in the air that he had never known in Kronweld. It filled him with a strange, sheer exuberance and pleasure in mere existence. Tall, white clouds roamed in the sky.
John Edwards looked up dubiously. “I hope we don’t get caught in a good thunderstorm before the day is over.”
“We can’t wait on that,” said William Douglas impatiently. “Finding the pinnacle is of more importance than a thunderstorm.”
Behind the casualness of the words Ketan sensed an urgency almost like that which drove himself. He wondered if the forces that reached out from the pinnacle had claimed William Douglas also.
For the first half of the day he had little time to think of anything but learning to ride properly. His two companions rode beside him, constantly keeping watch and trying to show him how to let his body follow the rocking motion of the animal.
Until almost night, they followed a winding trail through the forest, under the great trees that towered like some high vaulted roof above them.
Ketan’s instincts for Seeking were overwhelmed by his surroundings. There were Mysteries enough here for all the Seekers in a thousand Kronwelds. Compared with the fifteen different kinds of plants which he had found in Dark Land, he glimpsed a hundred different kinds as he rode along here. Impulse invited him to dismount and examine and collect them, but there was no time for that. Later, perhaps there would come a day.
He saw animals, too. There were tiny, scurrying things that climbed in the trees and raced along the ground. And once or twice he saw large, horned animals like the one William Douglas had killed.
When the sun was nearly down, they began to descend sharply and the trees about them were stubbier and thinned out. Then abruptly they came out on an exposed hillside where the mountains fell away to the endless expanse of desert below.
The sudden exquisite sight made Ketan catch his breath. In the distance, other flat-topped hills were bathed in purple sheen that merged with their natural red and bronze. As the sun lowered and the shadows lengthened, it seemed as if the endless desert were some vast sea of moving color and lights. It flowed and surged against his senses until he had to turn his head away.
But before he did, he had seen it.
He had seen beyond that red and yellow desert and the mountains
with their purple rims. He had seen an endless expanse and a needle peak thrusting up to break its bareness.
He pointed through a gap far across the desert. “It’s over there,” he said.
William Douglas started to speak and then closed his mouth silently. John Edwards only stared at Ketan and nodded.
They built a camp in a level clearing on the edge of the forest, and when they had eaten and the fire had nearly died they lay back and Ketan saw the stars.
That first night by the cave his senses had been too dulled to notice that they were more or brighter than in the cloud laden skies of Kronweld. But now he saw them. I le lay watching as a child might have watched, not amazed, not frightened, but accepting their wonder and their nearness as a part of a new world.
He turned to William Douglas who lay nearby with eyes looking far beyond the stars. “What are they? Does anyone know among your people?” Ketan asked.
“What are what?”
“Up there—those points of light”
“The stars”
“Is that what you call them? I wonder if it would be possible to go high enough to see what they are.”
William Douglas raised up on one arm and looked down at Ketan. “Do you mean that there are no stars visible in Kronweld? That you have no science of astronomy?”
“Only at rare, short intervals arc such lights visible in Kronweld. We have wondered about them, but we know nothing of them. They have always been declared a Sacred Mystery.”
“Stars.” He repeated the word and it flowed upon his lips and tongue like some breath of exotic winds. Into it he put all the awe and wonder, dependence and fear that man had known since, the first cave dwellers prayed to the gods of the rolling vastness of the sky and the first shepherds looked up to them at night with nameless pleading.
“Stars,” he said. “They look as the name sounds. Do you know what they are?”
William Douglas partook of the mood that encompassed Ketan. “They are dreams,” he said. “They are dreams and other lives and other homes and worlds where men are as they would be.”
His eyes came back to earth and he looked across the dying coals to the eyes of the stranger from out of another world. His glance fell upon the narrow features, the thin nostrils and sharp, never resting eyes, the high smooth forehead. “You’ve got to go back, Ketan,” he said. “This world will kill you.” “There are other worlds like this one?” Ketan persisted.
“Most of them are globes like our own sun. Some of them are other planets like this one. Many of those other suns have planets. There are probably more worlds like this one than you can number right in the range of your vision.”
“Kronweld … Kronweld could be such a world, could be on one of those worlds, couldn’t it?” Ketan breathed.
“I wonder—” said William Douglas.
When he at last slept, Ketan was still leaning on one ami, looking up at the stars.
Ketan did not think he had even been asleep when William Douglas began stirring again. The Illegitimate built up the fire and began breakfast.
“We’ve got to get an early start and put as much of that desert behind us as possible before the sun comes up,” he said. “It’ll be an oven out there by noon.”
The stars were still bright when they broke camp and wound their slow way down the mountainside. The sky was just beginning to glow in the east by the time they reached the desert floor.
A fringe of low clouds in the sky lighted up the world in a fire glow as they left the mountains behind them, and then slowly the desert turned to a sea of yellow. It gave a sense of unreality as if they were moving upon a liquid surface lighted from below. They seemed to have stopped moving entirely, for the mountains ahead came no nearer, and those behind seemed not to retreat.
His companions were obviously uncomfortable in the rising warmth of the day, but it did not trouble Ketan. It was like many oi Kron-weld’s days, and far less to endure than the inferno of Fire Land through which he had passed.
They stopped at a watering place at midday. The sun was overhead and so marked the passage of time, but to Ketan it seemed an illusion, for all time and all other experiences seemed lost upon this sea of yellow. We’
ll never reach the other side, he thought.
But by nightfall, they were nearing the gap in the mountains beyond and time resumed its flow. He knew that beyond that gap lay the greater desert where eternal winds blew and a single needle of rock pierced the sky.
“We’ll camp outside,” said John Edwards. “It’s hell in there. I don’t know whether we can make it in a day or not.”
So near his goal, Ketan hardly slept that night. All the hopes and fears that he had known returned in an avalanche of emotion and garbled reasoning. Would he at last find out wdiat the mysterious visions meant? Would the pinnacle contain the explanation of the artificialities and unrealities of Kronweld ?
Most of all, would it tell him how to go back—back to Elta?
He must have slept towards dawn again, for he was next aware of William Douglas preparing the fire. It was later now than the previous morning, and already the walls of the canyon were coloring’ like ripening fruit.
They resumed their way quickly and passed between the narrow gap with its towering walls. It was a short passage and after a single turn they glimpsed the distant end. It seemed as if a curtain of bronze were hung across it.
“That’s it,” said John Edwards, “and it’s hell.”
Then Ketan knew what it was. He was seeing it now, not in vision, but in reality. Beyond the mouth of the canyon was the desert, the desert of heaving, shifting, wind-borne sands. Hell, John Edwards called it. Ketan knew he had traversed it nearly a scorc of times.
The wind began to dip fingers into the canyon, sharp, golden fingers of sand that divided into yet a thousand other fingers and reached into their lungs and pierced their eyes and stung their skins. Half blinded by the lashing sand, they were not yet at the canyon’s end.
John Edwards coughed and swung his horse around. “We’ll have to wait,” he gasped. “We’ll never make it with that tornado blowing out there.”
The other two pulled up, covering their faces against the sand blast.
“It’s nearly always this way,” said Ketan.
“What about it?” asked William Douglas. “Is there much chance of this wind dying down?”
“It never dies down. But it might let up a little,” said John Edwards. “We could never find the pinnacle in that anyway. We couldn’t see it twenty yards away.”
“We could find it,” said Ketan quietly. “I don’t need to see it.”
As unerring as if a voice were guiding him, he knew that he could find it. He had done it before. He knew how it would be the instant they stepped out of the canyon’s mouth.
“Are you sure of that?” William Douglas asked.
Ketan nodded.
He hesitated, then decided. “We may as well make a try for it. We haven’t provisions enough for a long wait. I’m willing to believe that Ketan can take us there.”
John Edwards made no comment. He didn’t know or care much about Ketan and what mystic abilities he might have. He was something strange, out of the Illegitimates’ world. But John Edwards’ devotion to William Douglas was strong. Whatever the leader of the Illegitimates decided upon was right with John Edwards: It was fortunate that William Douglas was there to bridge the gap between them, Ketan thought.
They wrapped their faces in rags moistened from their canteens and reined the horses about. The animals reluctantly faced into the wind that thrust into the canyon’s mouth. Automatically Ketan now found himself in the lead. The others had given way to the instinct within him that they hardly dared trust.
The canyon walls became mere shadows only faintly darker than the sand mist about them. When they emerged from the mouth of the canyon they were never quite certain. They knew only that there came a sudden increase in intensity of the wind and the biting of the sand needles pierced deeper into their flesh.
The horses grew panicky in the blind, howling world of air and sand. It was only with difficulty that the riders maintained control. Ketan reined hard to keep his beast headed into the wind, but he had to let it go to keep its head down.
Thus, in their own silence, but amidst the howling of wind-driven sheets of sand, they rode on. It was a world of desolate, torturing night. Again Ketan felt that sense of lost time and motion, but a thousand times more intensified than out on the desert of the day before. Now he was in a world where motion was impossible, where time would never exist again. They were frozen in this timeless block of sand and air.
He turned to see if his companions were there. He could only see William Douglas a scant half length behind, but John Edwards was invisible. He hoped the other Illegitimate was still following.
He turned and tried to stare ahead, shielding his eyes from the blast. There was nothing. For a moment he let his thoughts absorb in introspection. Could he be sure they were headed right?
There was no doubt of it in his mind. As if an invisible guiding beam were trained upon his brain, he knew surely in what direction the pinnacle lay through the desert.
And as they went on, it seemed as if the gathering wisps of prescience of all the past tara combined in a single mighty conviction of guiding forces that had led him through every incident of his living to this present moment, It was right. He was where these forces had led him, and now, presently, they would reveal themselves and all the reality of the interlocked worlds that could be bridged by a pathway of light across the ages and through infinities.
There was no way of knowing where the sun was in the sky. It was only by the thickening of the gloom that they judged that night was coming. Yet it seemed incredible that a full day had passed even though the sand had seemed to beat upon them for an eternity.
And then it broke.
The curtain of swirling sand dropped as if melted in the sudden downpour of rain that fell upon them. The wind died with startling suddenness and water replaced the sand, falling in blinding sheets. But it was good.
They drew up together and halted and turned their faces up to it. They grinned at each other as the rain made little cascades in the furrows of their faces and carried with it the shattered cakes of sand that lay upon them.
“You were right about the thunderstorm,” William Douglas said to John Edwards, and am I glad!”
“Another hour of that and I’d have been gone. WTe lost two of the pack horses, did you know ?”
William Douglas looked back. His face sobered. “That means a shorter stay. Do you know where we are, Ketan?”
Ketan pointed. They saw it simultaneously. Through the misty curtain of water that fell about them, they saw in the distance the single column that reached towards the sky.
The pinnacle.
A sudden unreasonable excitement took possession of Ketan for an instant. It was the realization that here before him was the object of a life-long quest. Here was the visioned rock whose image had been burned in his brain before ever his eyes beheld it.
“Come on,” he said hoarsely.
The pinnacle was a single shaft of rock that seemed unbroken by the winds and frosts. It looked as eternal as the stars. The flat planes of its sides looked as if fashioned by the hands of the gods.
Even John Edwards was subdued by a sense of awe in the presence of the thing. “I’ll bet no man has been this close to it for a thousand years,” he murmured.
“Do you know what you expect to find, now?” asked William Douglas.
“Yes. Down near the base on the opposite side—”
He reined about. The feet of the horses padded upon the sand that was still powdery beneath the thin layer of mud. The thirst of the desert was hardly appeased by the thick rain.
It began to let up a little as they neared the pinnacle. Somehow the rock was larger than he had visioned it. William Douglas estimated it as two hundred feet in diameter and about six hundred feet high. Not another rise broke the flat expanse of sand as far as they could see.
The illusion of vast distance was partly due, they saw, to the slow rise of the desert sand that ait off the view of the mesas behind them.
John Edwards repeated his observation about the isolation of it. “If somebody wanted to hide anything, this would be a good place to put it.”
But Ketan was not listening. He was surveying the surface of the rock in vain. lie went to the other sides and scanned them. There was nothing there to mark the spot he searched for. He returned to his starting point and continued to stare up.
“It’s not there—” he began. Then his eyes lighted. “It’s down there,” he exclaimed. “The sand has buried it.”
“Buried what?” said William Douglas.
“The entrance,” said Ketan.
It was obvious that the sand had drifted about the base of the pinnacle to a considerable depth, for it sloped down in a long slant that indicated an excavation of many feet if they had to go down to a point level with the general expanse of the desert.
But Ketan indicated that they would have to dig to a depth not much more than equal to their own height. The vision in his mind was of a marker far above his head when standing on the level.
The sudden torrent of rain was slowly dying, and they could see breaks in the dark, overcast sky. The wind was rising again, portending a resumption of the sandstorm which the rain had interrupted, but it would not be as bad with the thin layer of wet, cakcd sand on the surface.
Their packs contained an assortment of crude tools of the Illegitimates’ own manufacture. They were fortunately on the animal which had not become lost in the storm. Ketan indicated the exact spot at which the digging should begin. There were no materials for shoring up the sides and as they dug they had to widen the mouth of the hole to account for the sand that constantly shifted down.
It was a wearying task, made miserable by the rising wind that swirled in the hole and limited the direction of shoveling so that only one man could work at a time. Night, too, was swiftly approaching and the lowering clouds were closing the gaps they had tentatively opened. It looked like a night of hurricane and rain.