The Glass Mountains (5 page)

“A war is coming,” the man was saying. He waved his wandlike weapon at them, so that I almost screamed, but he was waving for emphasis, not to threaten them. “You may need a weapon like this. Look, I’m not a killer. I could kill you and look for Samarr’s fortune, but I’m a peaceful man at heart. I have no quarrel with Bakshami or anyone living here. Oh, it’s the most horrible sector on the planet, but that’s not your fault. So come on, be reasonable.”
 

I ran to stand by my parents. “We saw him the other day,” I said.
 

“He’s a scavenger,” said my father. “And I don’t deal with scavengers.”
 

The man looked shrewdly at my mother. “You may feel differently.”
 

“We own no jewels,” she said. “We own only our dwelling, if you want that.”
 

“What are you saying?” said my father. “My parents built this home for us.”
 

“I am saying that a weapon like that may be of use. You’re forgetting the more practical elements of present circumstances.”
 

“We’ll be traveling with a hundred other families. We’ll be safe.”
 

“Safe from a hundred ships?”
 

“There are no hundred ships.”
 

I had never seen my parents disagree before, only overheard them a few times when they spoke louder than they realized from their room. So here it was again, the troubles from outside invading our home.
 

My mother turned to the man. “Samarr left us no fortune. If he did, we would give it to you. Such things mean nothing to us. We’re leaving almost everything we own. Is there any price you would take besides these jewels that don’t exist?”
 

He squinted and winked at me so that it seemed he had a flea in his eye. “How about this one? Is she strong enough to work hard until I need her to bear children?”
 

“Leave now, or I’ll kill you,” my father said evenly.
 

“My dog will kill you,” I shouted.
 

“Wait,” said my mother.
 

“Mother, what are you doing? Did you hear what he said?”
 

“What he said is ridiculous, of course.”
 

“We have our honor,” said my father.
 

“And we’ll have no less of it if we can come to terms. But what if I do end up with less? What good is honor if my children die on the way to the hotlands?”
 

“We may die of thirst, but no Bakshami has ever died for lack of a weapon.”
 

“Lack of precedent is irrelevant in a changing world,” said my mother.
 

“Your intelligence honors me,” the man said. He bowed extravagantly to her. “All right, forget your daughter. I have a servant already in another sector. Do you have any of those fierce dogs?”
 

“They’re not fierce,” I said with disdain. “They just don’t like you.”
 

He scowled at me. “I don’t like this one anyway. Have you any children who are more pleasant?” Scratching at his face, squinting his eyes, the man looked around the room. “I don’t want your house. A home in a dying land is no home at all.” His eyes brightened. “Do you think Samarr might have buried something around here?”
 

“Who can say?” said my mother.
 

“Here’s the deal I’ll make you. To prevent you from running off with any riches Samarr may have hidden, you must let me check all your bags and then you must vacate the dwelling immediately. In return, the weapon is yours.”
 

“Woman, are you mad?” my father said.
 

“Perhaps so. But not so mad that I would make this deal without my husband’s agreement.”
 

My father rubbed my face with his hand. “Are you scared, Mariska?”
 

“Yes.”
 

“I am, too,” he said. Then, to my mother, “You’re right, of course. What’s the point? He will take the house anyway, once we leave tomorrow. It’s best to bargain for a weapon that can save our lives. But I would have wished for more time to say my good-byes to the finest dwelling in the village.”
 

So the deal was made, and the scavenger handed her a weapon. And just like that, we no longer possessed a house. Instead we possessed a weapon. Later we were to find out that half the village had purchased similar weapons, and that none of them worked. By some act of prestidigitation, they’d worked only in demonstration. After coming to terms, the man checked the belongings we planned to take, and we walked out into the dry, lukewarm night. As soon as we stood outside, I began to wonder whether I’d chosen to bring the right clothes, the right doll. But it was too late to change my mind.
 

The wind was still and the air clear. Above me our moons hung across the sky. Lomos glowed orange-yellow at the horizon. We looked at our parents: where to?
 

A number of people had gathered for the storytelling, so we posted nine of our dogs with our belongings and went to listen to the stories. Artie stayed with me. I looked around for the meat-seasoner and his family but didn’t see them. A couple of the better storytellers had already left town, but my favorite raconteur, Cray, remained. He stood off to himself a bit, his lips moving, his eyes darting, as he warmed up for his story. Cray was an average-looking man when he walked about town, but when he told stories he got a lunatic glint to his eyes, and you suddenly noticed the weird looseness to his joints and a nimbleness that transcended even the natural grace of most Bakshami. He ran suddenly to the center of where we sat with a few dozen others. His eyes were alight with lunacy, and his limbs shook with the looseness of a skeleton. He leapt in front of me. “Mariska knows this story is true!” he exclaimed. He leapt to someone else, the old woman who had never developed much seeing and knowing powers. “And the honorable Fu-fat knows as well!”
 

Cray gazed up toward the sky, then eastward. “Toward the east lies one of the oldest civilizations on the planet, also the most barbaric: Soom Kali,” he intoned. He faced north, then south. “To the north and south the same: Soom Kali. To the west, Forma. We’re surrounded.
 

“The Soom Kali are rumored not to need much sleep because they’re too busy learning to be warriors. Before people began measuring time, the residents of Soom Kali were some of the meanest and craziest inhabitants of the Hooded Galaxy. They chose our planet Artekka to populate because of the size and emptiness. They wanted the emptiest world they could find, a giant kingdom to rule and perhaps to destroy.
 

“All the children of the original settlers in Artekka turned out to be as ferocious as their parents—except one, a boy born so good and kind his face glowed with benevolence and his smile enraged all those around him.”
 

Cray’s face began to radiate benevolence.
 

“The neighbors taunted him and his parents. They thought he was a weakling.
 

“So, the kindest man in Soom Kali traversed through his life alone, moving from state to state, hoping to find one other kind person. He would hear a rumor that another kind person lived here or there, and he would instantly drop whatever he was doing and travel to where this other kind person supposedly lived. But when he got there, he would find out the story of this person was really a mangled story about himself, and so he’d ended up traveling all that way in search of what he already lived with and saw reflected in glass or metal every day. Meanwhile he worked in sewers and gutters and dangerous caves. Nobody would hire him for a better job, and nobody would frequent a business that he might start.
 

“Finally, when the kindest man was two hundred years old, he made a mistake. He broke down and cried while working in a cave. He cried for only a short while, but that short inattention caused him not to notice that the air was running low. It was his job to warn the others. He thereby caused horrible deaths to several people who were lowly workers but respected nonetheless. For that’s the way it was in Soom Kali—one thing that must be said is that, except for their feelings about the kind man, they respected each other.
 

“So the kindest man was brought to trial and condemned to death. While he was waiting to die, he decided to throw himself over a wall. This he did, and he fell down a cliff and into a hole so deep he continued to fall for forty days, until he’d almost starved to death. Soom Kali was said to have a vast network of tunnels beneath it, and when he stopped falling and found himself in a tunnel he assumed that he was in that network, which had been built during a civil war among the original inhabitants.
 

“For a long time, he lived in tunnels, feeding the meager amounts of food he obtained by killing rodents to the cavedogs that befriended him. As I said, this all happened lifetimes ago, when there was more magic in the air than there is today. The magic made sparks in the rocks that helped him start fires when he was cold, and the magic cleaned the air of smoke when the fires died. Every day, with tools he made and by hand, the kind man dug more tunnels until after a hundred years he’d dug so furiously and blindly and in so convoluted a pattern that he didn’t know whether he was far from Soom Kali or right beneath it. Unbeknownst to him, he’d passed under seas and mountains, pastures and deserts, then circled here and there, back and forth, and now, when he emerged, he saw that he was in a vast desert land. He caught a glimpse of a beautiful blue wild beast, but as soon as he saw it, it was gone. It was a legendary flame beast, who moves with the quickness and grace of a flame across straw.”
 

Cray pranced about, at times leaping over our heads and seeming to change direction in midair. It seemed as if he could fly one moment, and the next moment he became a flame in its fullest glory. When he calmed down he continued.
 

“In the meantime he was able to catch some slower animals to eat, and to feed the loyal dogs that still accompanied him. The people of Soom Kali are unusually long lived, so he was still a reasonably young man by their standards. Every day he lived in fear that someone might follow him down a tunnel, so his new project became to close off the tunnel. After a year, he managed to accomplish this to his satisfaction. No one could get through. But then he realized that a part of him had hoped that someone would follow him, so at least he wouldn’t have to be alone anymore.
 

“He came to realize that his escape wasn’t a triumph at all, but another type of death. In order for his escape to mean anything, he thought, he needed to reproduce, so he tried with some dogs, but they miscarried, and with all manner of birds, trees, and lizards with no success. Finally he remembered the blue beast he’d seen, the wildest but most graceful beast that ever lived. Completely untamable. One day when he was hot, and low on water, and wondering whether he would die soon, he saw in the distance a blue cloud, and the cloud was a herd of desert flame beasts. He jumped on his sled, and his dogs pulled him across the sand, for even after all this time he couldn’t move very well in the sand. He managed to lasso one of the beasts. And that night, after a meal of fried rodents, and while the dogs howled to the moons, the kindest man and the wildest most graceful beast on the planet copulated. In four cycles, the graceful beast bore a child: the first Bakshami, descended from warriors and wild animals, with the grace to move over sand like a flame over straw, and with the kind nature to give hard-won food to another being who needs it.
 

“I tell this story not just for the children but for the grown-ups as well, so that in the days and years to come, as all of you travel to the hotlands in escape of domination, you remember your kind spirit and untamable ways.”
 

Cray’s eyes grew sad. “I won’t be coming,” he said. “Tomorrow I’m going into my dwelling and staying there until they take me out. I built that home myself. The spirits of five of my dead children live there.”
 

Way in the background I saw the flea-bitten man lurking. I looked around at my neighbors, with their dogs and packages and sand sleds, and I looked around at all our shining dwellings, reflecting the large round moon and misshapen small one, and I knew that whatever remained in those dwellings would soon be robbed by the flea-bitten man and his peers. I knew I might never set foot in my house again. And with a newly born hardness in my heart, I knew that my mother was right: At least we’d gotten a weapon in the deal.
 

Part Two

1

When my brothers, my sisters, and I were all very young we traveled only with our parents. But dangers were few in Bakshami, and because Maruk had begun to grow older and stronger, if a journey was less than a couple of days we traveled only with him. Maruk was impulsive, but he was responsible, and also a sort of maverick general. That is, he liked being in charge, but he also respected the good qualities of his sisters and brothers and enjoyed delegating authority and exercising his independence. By the end of our projected journey to the hotlands, he would be old enough to build a house for himself, to become an apprentice storyteller, or, if he wished to do so, to mate with his betrothed if she survived the trip. Depending on hardships encountered, the trip might take as long as a year.