by ST Branton
“Whoa.” I glanced around, wide-eyed. “This is pretty awesome, actually.”
It pales in comparison to the Roman Empire, of course.
I frowned. “Let’s find someone and hope they speak enough English to give us directions.” The streets were cold and windswept but faces appeared in a few windows as I made my way deeper into the village. A door squeaked open on my left, and an old woman with a sweet, wrinkled face and a scarf tied around her head beckoned me inside. She placed her arm around my shoulders and urged me across the threshold.
“Thank you,” I said, not at all sure that she understood. “Um, could you tell me how to find…” I retrieved the tablet and opened the map to show her. She blinked at the screen. “I’m looking for this mountain.” I pointed at the dot on the map. “I really need to get there.” The old lady turned her eyes to me. They were shiny and black and crinkled at the corners. “If you don’t know, that’s okay!”
She held up a slightly crooked finger, sat me down in one of the two chairs at her table, and hurried through a doorway. I opened my mouth to call after her but she had already gone. When she returned a minute later, she had a younger man with her, his face half obscured by a thick beard. She talked to him in what I thought might be the same language the pilots had spoken and gestured in my direction. I tried to look apologetic.
The man smiled. “Grandmother says you only speak English? She thinks that you are lost.”
“Oh.” I barely stopped myself from saying shit in time. “Well, she’s two for two.”
“I see.” His smile widened. “How may I help you? This is a strange place to be lost in if you will allow me to say so.”
I showed him the tablet. “Well, I need to get to this mountain and I’m not sure which one it is.”
“It is true that there are many mountains in this region,” he said a chuckled. “Let me see.”
He took the device from my hand and studied it for a while with a slight frown. I thought I’d have to show him how to operate the touch screen, but he manipulated it without any problems.
“Ah,” he said at last. “I understand. Unfortunately, this mountain is very far away. You are searching for a different village to the north. A few hundred miles.”
I nodded and tried to conceal my disappointment. “All right. Thanks.”
He handed back the tablet. “I am sorry that you have so far yet to go. Grandmother has taken a liking to you.”
The old woman beamed and showed all her teeth.
“I appreciate the help,” I said. “What’s the quickest way to cover that kind of distance? I’m in a something of a rush.”
He tilted his head to regard me curiously. “You are the only person I have ever met who rushes to the mountains.” A thoughtful expression crossed his face. “But I may be able to help further.” He retreated into the other room and returned wearing a parka. “There is a man in the village who owns a car. Perhaps he can take you the rest of the way.” He said something to his grandmother, then opened the door and motioned for me to follow. “Come with me and we will ask him.”
We went down the street and turned into an alley lined with doors and balconies so close that they almost touched. More flags hung between the railings amid empty clotheslines. The man knocked at the fourth door.
“We may have to try more than once,” he told me. “Sometimes, he has trouble hearing.”
The sound of shuffling footsteps reached our ears and a slot in the door opened. My guide spoke briefly. He pointed to me and I waved.
A second later, the door swung inward to reveal an older gentleman whose black hair had gone mostly grey. He inspected me closely. I showed him the tablet.
“Yes,” he said. “I drive you.”
“Really?” I couldn’t keep the excitement out of my voice. Both men laughed.
“Yes, yes,” said the driver. “We leave now. Road is empty at night.” He motioned with his hands. “Faster.”
“Okay,” I said. “Awesome!” I turned to the first man. “Thank you so much. And thank your grandmother too.” I checked my pockets. “I wish I had something to give you in exchange.”
“Oh, no.” The man shook his head. “You must not give me anything. Where you are going, you will need all you have.” He smiled again and shook my hand. “Good luck to you, traveler. May you find the blessings you seek.” He patted my shoulder and turned toward the old lady’s house.
“Come, come,” the driver said. He led me around the back of the building to a small, partially fenced lot. A car sat hidden under a thick tarp and I helped him unfasten the ties. It looked like an ancient cab, the yellow paint chipped and faded. The driver produced a key and unlocked my side before he hurried around the front hood to wedge himself behind the steering wheel. The interior smelled vaguely musty.
“Does it still run?” I joked before I realized that he might not know I was kidding.
To my great relief, he laughed. “It runs, yes! It runs.” As a demonstration, he started the old engine, which coughed but rumbled to life. “See? Good car.”
“Great car,” I said.
He nodded. “Let’s go.”
We crept out of the lot at less than five miles an hour and gingerly negotiated the tight corners. But when we finally reached the actual road, he accelerated and the engine roared. The exhaust backfired a couple times. Villagers emerged from their houses and hung out the windows to watch us pass by. Some of them cheered.
“Do they know where we’re going?” I asked.
The driver shrugged. “Probably no,” he answered. “They simply wish you well.”
We rode together in silence for a while as the old vehicle bumped over the unpaved road. Once the cab reached its optimum speed, it chugged along like an old, reliable workhorse. The driver glanced constantly at me in the rearview mirror. He seemed eager to socialize.
“What you are doing here?” he asked and seemed to choose his words carefully. “Vacation?”
I shook my head. “No vacation. I, uh…I heard this was a good place to come if you want to find yourself.”
He grinned. “On top of mountain, find lots of cold, maybe. Snow and big sky. Storms.”
I sat in silence and suppressed the instinctive response that those had better not be all there was. He frowned and his cheerful face darkened abruptly.
“It is dangerous,” he told me. “Out here. There are a lot of bad things.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Bad things, as in bad people? I can handle those.”
“No.” He wagged a finger in warning. “The evil ones, they walk amongst them.”
I sighed. Exactly what I wanted to hear.
In the silence that ensued, I leaned back into the passenger seat and watched this new part of the world roll by. Every so often, the driver would gesture out one side of the car or the other to point out landmarks or try to share some interesting fact. I really wanted to ask him more about the aforementioned evil ones, but he didn’t seem too keen on the subject. His eyes clouded over whenever he so much as started to mention them and I gave up after a while. The guy was doing me a huge favor. It would be stupid to antagonize him before he’d gotten me where I needed to go.
The hours ran into each other as we cruised down that lonely, winding road. The mountains inched closer and closer until I could no longer see the misty outlines of even the lowest peaks. Finally, we chugged our way into a proper little town with big old stones set into the roads.
The same densely packed, brightly colored houses lined the streets. Near the town center, an open-air market attracted decent crowds. I paused with my hand on the door. People walked the streets as I expected but there were all kinds of Forgotten, too. I identified satyrs, Weres, and a gaggle of the stunted golems we’d encountered in D.C. A tall, lean vampire in an elegant coat stood outside a pot maker’s stall and examined the wares.
“What’s going on here?” I mused.
The driver scowled for the first time since we’d left his home villag
e. He spat out an ugly word that had to be a curse and accelerated away as soon as I shut the car door behind me. Lumbering, stone-skinned gargoyles ambled past, their chiseled features set to mild ambivalence. At first, I was tense and ready for imminent confrontation. But these streets were peaceful if not normal.
“This is weird,” I muttered to Marcus. “Why don’t they act like pricks?”
They appear to lack the natural aggression we have observed thus far, he responded. I must confess, I have never seen it before.
“Maybe they’re under some kind of spell.” I slipped as inconspicuously as possible through the streets and studied my surroundings as unobtrusively as I could. The satyrs there were sober, well-groomed, and unarmed. No one gave me a second glance. I entered the town bazaar and pretended to scan the stalls instead of their patrons. I was sure a fight would erupt at any moment.
Fortunately, that never happened. Humans and Forgotten browsed the handcrafted goods side by side. They made conversation. I felt like I had gone crazy.
“Hey! American girl!” An English-speaking voice cut through all the foreign buzz.
I turned to look at its source and saw a small, wiry man perched on a stool behind his stall. He motioned me over.
“A rare sight in these mountains,” he said and laughed.
I made a vague gesture around the market. “What is all this?” I asked. “These people don’t care about the…” I mimed horns, wings, and fangs.
He smiled. “Elsewhere, perhaps they are monsters, but not here. These have defied their former masters and freed their minds of oppression. They came in search of freedom, and that is what they found. We have simply accepted their presence.”
“Huh.” I took another look around the vicinity. “And it’s working out.”
He shrugged his thin shoulders. “So far. We know they could turn on us at any time. In the beginning, many of us lived in fear. But they never chose anything other than peace. Now, we believe they are no different from us in here.” The shopkeeper tapped the left side of his chest.
I looked into the unwavering serenity of his eyes. “I wonder if this is the way it could be everywhere,” I said quietly.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“New York City.”
He chuckled. “And you do not have stranger citizens than this in New York?” He nodded his head at a small herd of centaurs that trotted down the middle of the road. They moved slowly so as not to pose a danger to the surrounding pedestrians and smiled as they greeted humans and other Forgotten alike. The brands on their bodies had faded to almost nothing.
I still had trouble wrapping my mind around the concept of humans and Forgotten coexisting. “Do you know where to find a guide?” I asked. “I’d like to go into the mountains.”
“Ah,” he said. “So that is your business.” He leaned out of the stall and pointed down to the end of the row of buildings, immediately beyond the far perimeter of the market. “There, you will find your guide.”
“Thanks.” I moved quickly toward the house. Now that I was hyperaware of the Forgotten that roamed the street, it was a little unsettling to be outside. I ducked into the side alley and knocked on the door.
What an extraordinary place, said Marcus. I was certain that he said that with a frown. I am not sure how I feel.
“You and me both, my friend.” On the surface, this town looked like a utopia, and maybe it really was. But it sure felt as weird as hell.
The person who answered the door was a kid, shorter than me with a mop of dark hair that hung in his big brown eyes. He could not have been more than sixteen or seventeen. “What’s wrong?” he asked me in English. “Do you need help?”
“Uh.” I hesitated. “Someone told me I’d be able to find a guide at this house. I’m sorry if I have the wrong address.” I took out the tablet to show him.
“No, you are correct,” the boy said. “I would be happy to guide you.”
“You’re the guide?” The question popped out of my mouth before I had the chance to stop it.
He nodded as if it was the most natural thing in the world. “Do not be worried. I am young but the mountains favor me. We will have no trouble.”
This child is either very brave or very stupid.
I tried to look past him into the house in case there were any adults around. “Are you absolutely sure about that?” I asked.
“Yes, yes.” He stepped aside to let me in. “I have guided many feet to the peaks and down. I promise you, this is the truth.” He smiled. “Take a room in the house for your rest tonight. Tomorrow, we leave at daybreak.” He closed the door.
I stood there in the dim, narrow hall for a minute or two and mulled over this new situation. The kid didn’t move and he didn’t stop smiling either. “All right,” I said. There was nothing to do but press forward. “We leave at daybreak.”
Chapter Nineteen
A brisk tap on my bedroom door woke me from a dead sleep the next morning. The kid was there, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and all geared up for our expedition. His pack was at least as big as the one I’d brought with me, and he still grabbed mine and slung it on his back.
“Hey, I can carry that,” I said as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes.
“Nope,” was his only reply. He ran to the other room and returned with some breakfast in the form of bread, water, and dried meat, which he pressed into my hand. “Eat. We have to go. The climb is half a day’s journey and we do not want to come down in the dark.”
I decided not to mention the fact that I had no idea what was in store up there or if I’d even come down at all. Instead, I stuffed some jerky in my face and trailed down the hall after him, out of the house, and into the still-dark street.
The first misty fingers of morning had barely pushed up from the horizon, and the air was bitterly cold. The kid’s trajectory was set and sure. He trotted to the town center, where the empty skeleton of the bazaar waited to fill up for the day. A few young men stood around with rickshaws and rubbed their hands together. The boy picked one and hopped on. I joined him.
The two of them talked for a while on the way out of town. I sat in the back with my hands in my lap and felt strangely unencumbered without my pack. My young guide, on the other hand, looked like he shouldn’t have been able to move under all that weight, but he was as hardy as a goat. The rickshaw operator dropped us off at a trailhead in the steeper foothills, and the kid walked unbowed ahead of me, his hair blowing in the wind. My leg protested but I picked up my pace to draw even with him.
“You are limping,” he observed. “Would you like to return to the town?”
I waved away his concern. “It’s nothing,” I said. “I’ll be fine. I’ve looked forward to this hike for weeks.” It was something of an exaggeration but not wholly untrue. I did want to know what waited at the summit of this mountain. Also, I wanted this trip over with so I could head back to Indiana as soon as possible. Delano wouldn’t wait around and look for me forever.
“Let me know if you change your mind.” Those eight words were the most the boy spoke aloud for a long time.
He traversed the trail effortlessly and his expression never deviated from one of simple calm. I realized that he was at home up there, even loaded down with two packs and thick, insulated clothing. I wondered if he liked it better at higher altitudes because of all the Forgotten in his town.
It was tough to simply dive into that kind of heavy discourse so I decided to start small. “Hey, I never got your name,” I said. “I’m Vic.”
He gave me a slight smile. “My name is Shiva,” he said.
I grinned back. “Oh yeah? How does it feel to be named after a god these days?”
Shiva knitted his brows. “I am named for a real god,” he replied. “Not like these imposters.”
Ha! The unadulterated wisdom of youth.
“My guess is you’re not the biggest fan of all those ‘imposters’ living around your home then,” I said.
To th
at, he shook his head and his shaggy hair swung back and forth over his eyes. “Those creatures are not the same,” he answered. “My people are much more open-minded to certain things than your cultures in the West. We know those beings are not evil, and we have learned to reside together in harmony. This has happened for months.” He adjusted the double pack on his shoulder without slowing down. “They have given us nothing to fear.”
Marcus grumbled. I rescind some of my previous statement. The Forgotten have never been anything but trouble. It is folly for this boy and his people to allow them space in their town.
I wanted to respond but it became more difficult. The wound in my leg carried a persistent, painful beat that strengthened the more time I spent walking. Tiny beads of sweat formed on my skin, aftereffects of powering through the pain. Still, I pushed onward.
Shiva pulled a little ahead again and I clenched my jaw in determination. I told myself that a half day’s climb was nothing and that I’d rest at the summit in no time.
For a while, that tactic worked. I was able to put my injury out of my thoughts and focus on the austere beauty of the mountains. When the grades became steeper, though, my leg complained louder as I scrambled up nearly vertical faces and squeezed through tall, narrow crevices. The discomfort gradually worked its way up to my hip and engulfed most of the right side of my body. A few times, I paused instinctively for tiny respites when Shiva wasn’t looking but stopping wasn’t an option, no matter how hard this damn mountain kicked my ass. I had already screwed up once. I wouldn’t do it again.
Mother Nature, however, had other plans. The clear sky we had enjoyed since dawn was rapidly smothered by the same heavy grey clouds my plane had flown through on the way into this region of South Asia. The change in weather gave Shiva pause. He studied the patterns in the cloud cover and finally said, “It would be wise to turn back now. This is not good climbing weather. It is no longer safe.”