Wheel of the Winds

by M J Engh

  As the Warden had thought, their climbing was not done. The land was level enough for a little way, but soon it began to rise, sometimes in smooth and rounded slopes, sometimes in broken terraces and stairsteps, and again in anthill piles of loose rubble like the first they had climbed; and all, always and everywhere, was bare stone, without a fistful of earth to cover it, still less any growing thing. And when again they built a fire at one of their resting stops, that came ever more often, the Exile's face by its light showed sick as if with grief.

  Yet a little while later, coming to the top of a crag, they found the darkness lightened so that they could make out each other's shapes; and, turning, they saw far behind them a red light as of forests burning, and the clouds afire with it, so that all the horizon flamed and glowed. And the Exile said in a choked voice that they had climbed so high they could see the edge of the light. But what troubled him, as they found by much questioning, was not that they were so high, but rather that they were still so near.

  Indeed it was not cheerful to think that they had half a world to cross in the darkness, being already at the end of their food and water, and no sign of more to be found. “But,” Repnomar said impatiently, and shaking the Exile's arm to be sure of his attention, “you thought you could do it alone; and if one can do it, four can do it better.” (For she considered Broz to be as useful a companion as any.) “All that remains is for you to tell us how.”

  But the Exile replied that he had no hope of crossing that desolation of darkness and coming alive to its farther edge, and that in his opinion four would be merely four times quicker to die from lack of food, unless in desperation they chose to feed on each other (a notion at which he shuddered in disgust). And when the Warden demanded to know why, in the name of any or all gods, they were yet journeying, he added hastily that he had good hope of the mountain peaks before them; for those peaks, standing in light, had their own edge of darkness, and it was there that he believed his precious things to be.

  To which the Warden answered heartily, “Damn your precious things! Will there be food and drink there?” And the Exile answered yes. “Then let's go on,” the Warden said in a voice like a growl, and turning abruptly on his heel. And without more talk they all followed.

  Once only they stopped to look back to where the clouds burned now dull purple and scarlet on the horizon, and the Exile had to be pulled away at last from his staring; for, as he explained it to them, in his own world such sights were momentary, coming and going swiftly about dinnertime. “And I suppose,” said the Warden, “that the mountains also rise and sink while you have breakfast.” To which the Exile, with some diffidence and clearing his throat once or twice, replied that in most worlds of his acquaintance darkness and light were not fixed in their own places, but moved steadily forward, as a river flows.

  “Flowing to where?” the Captain asked. And the Exile answered shyly, as one without much hope of being believed, that they flowed round and round those worlds, coming every three or four watches (as human watches went) back to where they had begun. But the Captain said that this was nonsense.

  Indeed they had all grown irritable, and perhaps a little lightheaded; and when, at the next pause, they looked back and saw only darkness, the Captain burst into raucous laughter, saying, “Well, we've sunk the light!” Lethgro felt in his heart that it was folly to speak words of such ill omen aloud, and it was silently that he made his own farewell to light forever.

  All sense of time seemed to have left them with the sense of sight (for the shining summits above were like things dreamed of rather than things seen), and they had no notion how long they had trudged and clambered, on hands and knees as often as on their feet, when Broz saved them. This he did with a short bark of joy, and thrusting his muzzle into Repnomar's hand; and Repnomar, straightening from a crouch, cried in a hoarse voice, “He's found water!”

  What Broz had found was more than water, though they did not realize this at first. He led them to a frozen pool, thickly iced at the edges but with a runnel of liquid water through the middle, and there they drank deep and refilled the Exile's flask, which had long been empty. It was the Warden who, his boot breaking through the ice, lifted a chunk of it in his fingers and cried out that there was something growing on it.

  “Under it, you mean, Lethgro,” the Captain muttered a minute later, as they all three, on their knees around the pool, pried and pounded at the ice. And Lethgro said, “We need light for this,” and fell to striking a fire.

  In some places it was no more than a frothy slime on the underside of the ice; but in others it was a mat of mosslike stuff, gray and unwholesome to look at in the firelight, and infested with soft sluglike things that shrank and stretched and oozed between the fingers. Disagreement arose at once.

  “This is no time to be squeamish,” the Captain insisted. “Any muck's worth eating, when it comes to eat or starve.”

  “It hasn't come to that yet,” the Warden answered somewhat snappishly. “There's still a chance for the Exile to show us he knows how to speak the truth.”

  To this remark the Exile could not well object, only maintaining that while he was sure there would be good supplies of food with his precious things, he could not be quite sure how near those things were. Still, he too was against eating of the stuff they had found—not, he said, from squeamishness, but from fear that it might prove poisonous. His idea, therefore, was to carry a supply of the gray muck with them (slugs and all, for they were the only meat that offered), hoping to reach his precious things before they were obliged to eat it; or, if they thought that too long a wait, at least to let the crows sample such unpromising food before they ate of it themselves.

  This, in truth, it was too late to decide on, for the crows were already pecking and scratching at the overturned slabs of ice, eating the slugs with all signs of relish and nibbling at the moss. So they built up the fire and rested and warmed themselves, watching the crows a little uneasily. But the crows, so far from giving any sign of distress, were altogether happier than they had been for many watches past, taking much pleasure in the fire and the food. “And I've watched their feasting long enough,” said the Captain. “The rest of you can sit hungry as long as you like, but I'm ready for a bowl of slug stew.” And she set to filling her bailer with slugs and water and a fistful of slimy moss for flavoring.

  It was unsavory enough, and Lethgro had to turn away from the light of the fire before he could bring himself to choke down his share; but once down it warmed his belly, and went some way toward filling it, so that they started on again warmed within and without, and freshly supplied with a flask full of water and a bailer full of stew. Their very eyes felt rested, by the firelight and the sight of each other and of their own hands, so that they went back to their groping in the dark with better courage. And though, as they journeyed, the Warden was taken by one strange pang after another as the unaccustomed food worked in his belly, and the thought of it in his mind, still he was glad on the whole that they had eaten it and were likely to eat of it again; especially as the Exile now began to say that it was likely his precious things were not on this side of the peaks, but rather just beyond them.

  As it turned out, they had come into a land of plenty, or what seemed like plenty after the desolation they had struggled through so far. It was rough and rising ground, but still walkable; and what gladdened their hearts was that it was laced with little streams and pools, and on the pools ice, and under the ice all that muck of moss and crawling things, which was to them now like a banquet spread. Still more, the very stones they traveled over were crusted here and there with a thin growth of something, like flaking layers of paint, and sometimes padded with bristly mosses; and in little hollows of the rock the Warden rubbed between his fingers what felt like soil, a sweet thing to touch after so many miles of barren stone.

  These things excited them all, but they excited the Exile beyond reason. For he said that on his world nothing could live without light, unless by fe
eding on the things that lived by light, so that at bottom it was light that fed all things living; but here, it seemed, life grew out of darkness. And he talked at length of little live things, doubtless too tiny to see, that could make nourishment in the dark out of rock and water, and so feed such larger game as slugs and make soil for mosses and the like. He was forever stooping to pluck and scrape bits of whatever he took to be live stuff from the ground, and pocketing them proudly. The Warden, too, did his share of gathering; for where the spiky moss grew thick he plucked it by handfuls, to restock his bundle of fuel, for they had burned almost all in their celebration at the first ice pool. And the crows came down from perching on their shoulders and busied themselves; for they found small game, some as big as crickets, in the mosses and in the patches of soil. But Broz, for all his searching, found nothing larger.

  When they camped at the end of that watch (though indeed they kept but ragged account of time in the darkness, and no longer knew or very much cared how many real hours had passed) the Warden spent his time on guard in scouring all the rocks about for more mosses; and when the Captain woke she heard strange rustlings in the dark, and upon her asking, “What are you doing, Lethgro?” he answered, “Padding my shirt.” Indeed he had already stuffed the toes and bottoms of his boots with dry moss, sadly cramping his feet, and was now cramming wads of it into his sleeves and close against his chest. “And you'll do the same, Rep, if you take my advice,” he said. “And the Exile most of all, for the cold is hardest for him to bear.”

  It was the streams that had put this idea into the Warden's head, for they reminded him of the snow streams that fed the Upper Sollet, and he thought that if these streams too were fed by snow, it would be snow that made white those peaks to which they climbed; and thinking thus, he remembered that the mountaineers around the headwaters of the Sollet padded their garments with sheep's wool against the cold. This spiky moss was a poor substitute for soft fleece; but, as the Warden said, “Logs will keep out the wind as well as marble; and who eats slugs might as well wear moss.” So for a time they busied themselves with this, plucking the moss and shaking out of it as much of its livestock as they could before they wadded it into their clothes; and when they went on they kept up their harvesting, stooping whenever their feet struck a mossy place, and calling out to each other when they found good patches.

  They were so busy with this reaping that they scarcely noticed how close they had come to the light of the peaks. A feeling of triumph had been on them since that meal by the ice pool, as if their way thereafter must be easy and all their troubles sure of solution, so that they were ill prepared when Repnomar, stopping dead in her tracks, cried out suddenly that the peaks were gone.

  Indeed, those beacons, that had begun to seem within their reach, had vanished utterly. Before them as behind, the world was solid darkness.

  13

  Of the Preciousness of Things

  Later—when they had got back strength enough to argue—they discussed whether that watch had been the longest of their journeying so far, and came to no agreement, having no means but the weariness of their muscles and the fogginess of their minds by which to measure the time since their last sleep.

  “But I'll grant you your bet, Repnomar,” said the Warden. “For if it's been more than twenty watches I couldn't prove it; and in any case, we've outrun my expectation by coming here alive at all.”

  They were settled at ease on a ledge of bare rock, out of the wind and taking their pleasure in the light. At their backs rose a cliff smooth and hollowed like the inside of a bowl, so that it arched a sort of lip or roof over their heads, hiding the white snow peaks above them. Below their ledge, a long white slope stretched downward into darkness. “And if the crust on that snow had been thinner,” Repnomar said thoughtfully, “I might not have won that bet, Lethgro.”

  It was the Exile who had first realized what had wiped out the peaks from that black prospect (for indeed his eyes served better in the dark than those of ordinary humans, and he could make out shapes where all was one blind blank to the others); but they would all have known it soon enough, for walking straight into the cold breath of the wind they came against the foot of whatever tall barrier it was that had cut off their view of the peaks. Repnomar laid her hand on it, and swore briefly, and tried her knife on its surface, and swore again, not so much in anger as in admiration. “Taste a bite of this, Lethgro,” she said, putting a cold chip of something into his hand. “Is this what you make mountains out of?” And Lethgro answered, “Not Sollet Mountains.” For this time the cliff that blocked their way was not rock, but ice.

  “Well, for my money,” said Repnomar, “a mountain of ice is worth two of rock; for we can make our own toeholds where we want them.” And she went on hacking at it with her knife.

  Here the Exile remarked that it was not truly a mountain, but a kind of river. At this Repnomar could not repress a snort of laughter. “And better a river of ice than of rock, if it comes to that,” she said. “But I hope the next one will be water.”

  They had not discussed this question of ice rivers much, nor any other, being too occupied with the business of cutting holds for themselves in the wall of ice, and after that with climbing. It was not all so easy as the Captain would have it, for the ice was sometimes hard almost as rock itself, sometimes flawed and brittle; and they came to the top at last panting and trembling, whether with cold or with strain, and dragging Broz bodily behind them at the end of the rope.

  “But it is the top,” the Captain said, when she had got her breath back, and was rubbing Broz's limbs to comfort and warm him; “for there are our landmarks.”

  Between climbing and walking, they had come a long way; and the peaks, no longer hidden by that bulwark of ice on whose top they now sprawled easily, stood like white towers above them, almost within their reach. The Exile drew a slow breath and stood up, saying stolidly that it was time to move on (though indeed they had not rested), and the Warden followed. The truth was that freezing now seemed a likelier death than any other, and to keep moving their only hope of keeping warm. For not all the Warden's stuffing of moss sufficed to keep out the wind that gnawed at them now, not strong but icy; and besides, a good deal of that stuffing had fallen out in the rough climb. So they plodded on, their hands jammed into their sleeves for warmth and the crows sailing out of sight on the wind above them.

  The crows, it soon appeared, were lucky. “If this is a river,” the Captain said sourly, “that was the waterfall where we found it first, and this part must be the rapids.” For they had come now upon a stretch of ice that was rough with great lumps and split with cracks and pitted with holes of a size to catch feet and wrench ankles; and all this shrouded over with dry snow. And the Exile warned them that there might be worse cracks and pits, apt for breaking more than ankles. So they struggled on, stumbling often, till sheer weariness constrained them to rest for a little, and then on again, sometimes refreshing themselves (to call it that) with frozen chunks of their stew chipped off by Repnomar's knife. Once the Exile, tugging at Lethgro's moss-padded sleeve, asked meekly what were the chances of lighting a fire; and Lethgro without hesitation lifted the bundle from the little man's back and set about it, for he thought that the Exile was not one to beg a favor unless out of desperate need.

  It was only a poor fire they managed on the ice, for the hotter it burned, the faster the ice melted and soaked it. But with constant care (and, as the Exile mournfully observed, the waste of considerable fuel) it sufficed to thaw the Exile's hands and face, which were near turning to ice themselves; and though this clearly brought tears of pain to his eyes, he made out that they were tears of relief, and rubbed them away quickly before they could freeze. Here too they thawed the dregs of the stew, and finished it (Broz licking out the bailer) and drank water warmed in the soggy embers. And after this they went on very silently, thinking each their own thoughts.

  So that the others, Broz included, all jerked with surprise when the Ex
ile spoke suddenly, saying in a hoarse voice that they had arrived.

  This, as it turned out, was somewhat hastily spoken. But the Exile held to it that the dark had lightened, claiming that he could now see passably well, and attempting to prove it by foretelling humps and holes in the ice before they reached them, which he did with some success. “But be that as it may,” said Repnomar, “we can all see what we're about to come to.”

  Very strange it looked to her, though she strove to liken it to sights she had seen often enough—a fogbank on the Soll, the white cliffs of the Coast, clouds to windward of a passing storm. It was like all these, indeed, but more unlike, because it rose out of darkness—a pale, far-stretching sheet of light that climbed ever higher, whiter, clearer, to where it leaped in striped and jagged pinnacles against the black sky.

  “It's a field of snow, Repnomar, not a storm on the Soll,” the Warden said curiously, for he wondered to see her stand hesitating. He himself had tramped such snowfields on the skirts of the Sollet Mountains.

  In her heart, Repnomar might have preferred a storm on the Soll just then; for glad as she was to be coming into the light once more, and eager for a sight of those elusive things of the Exile, yet she was very weary, and so much strangeness had taken a toll even on her, so that she only muttered something about sinking in snow as well as in water, and put her head down and strode forward.

  She was almost right. The snow, as they came out of darkness into a growing pallor of light, lay ever thicker, hiding crevices and fissures and hobbling their cold and weary legs, that moved now like so many ungainly planks and poles. Snow blew into their faces, filled their shoes, found its way down their collars. It was Broz, floundering off to one side in his search for footing, who found a better path and called the others’ notice to it with sharp yaps. Here, by some trick of the ground, the light fell brighter, which was a comfort to them; but a greater comfort was the crust of hardened snow that bore up considerable weight before it cracked and gave way beneath a plunging foot. Broz and the Exile traveled at ease here, or what seemed like ease to the others, who went most uneasily and with many sudden oaths, yet better than before. The slope was steep here, too, and the wind perhaps more keen; so that with one thing and another they paid little heed to the scene around them, till the Exile (who was now first on the rope) called out eagerly and pointed. And looking up, they saw that they were coming among the very peaks, where stone stood bare out of the whiteness.