West of January (20 page)

The Great River was easy to find. Even I could smell the difference in the water, and the tussocks of vegetation floating in it were not yet yellowed by excess salt. Most rivers are narrow, short-lived, and drinkable. This one was a moving sea, too wide for both banks to be visible at the same time. Frith and Pfapff seemed excited at the chance to explore a new environment, and they plunged eagerly ahead.

Eventually I grew so tired and hungry that I had to call for a halt. The sun was near to being overhead and there were few shadows, but I asked to be put ashore on some high rocks, and I found a shaded ledge. Soon thereafter Frith put up his head, made his chuckling sound, and threw me a fish that would have fed half the tribe. I ate. I slept. This time I dreamed of Loneliness, and I nearly wept with relief when I awoke and saw that Frith was still there. Had he left me, I should have died very quickly on that barren little island.

Two more sleeps brought me to the mountains and to faster currents. By then my skin was peeling in sheets from the continuous salt and sun, yet I had no alternative but to continue, and I was excited by the sight of the huge hills and the vaster hazy-blue giants raked along the horizon behind them.

With no warning, Frith and Pfapff balked. They swam in circles, chattering furiously, and no signal or word from me would persuade them to go farther. Of course, the words I knew were little closer to their true speech than “Whoa!” is to horse talk. I could tell them what I wanted, but in no way could I explain why it was important.

Important or not, my journey seemed to have ended. I even tried dismounting and swimming in the direction I wanted to go. They let me do so, clattering with amusement as the current swept me backward toward the March Ocean. Only when I was exhausted and sinking did Frith stop laughing and retrieve me.

I asked again and was refused again. Then, just as I was ready to admit defeat, a strange thing happened. A tremor of excitement ran through the great muscular back I straddled. At the same instant Pfapff sounded. I knew from the angle of her tail that she was going deep. Frith sank as low in the water as he could without drowning me and then just drifted, listening.

Of course, I remembered how I had learned of Pebble s death, and I was filled with dread that something bad had happened back at the grove. I felt deep booming sounds from Pfapff. Those I knew to be long-distance talk. Some important message was being passed.

Both great ones surfaced simultaneously, spouting and gibbering. They held a long conversation, but if they were trying to tell me the news, they failed utterly. To my astonishment, however, they then set off against the current at high speed, with me hanging grimly to Frith’s fin and Pfapff leaping exuberantly alongside. Showing no further hesitation, they carried me up the Great River and through the mountains.

Of course, I was perplexed beyond measure at their change of heart. It was much, much later that I received a plausible explanation, and it came from Kettle, a former seaman and by then a saint, great scholar, and senior aide to Gabriel himself. My companions’ initial reluctance to go farther, he suggested, had probably been due to the increasing noise of the river. It would have cut them off from the sounds of the ocean and from the chatter of the other great ones. Then, just as I had concluded that I must abandon my mission, they had learned of the impending disaster.

Brown-yellow-white, the angel who had bewitched me into this folly, was one of two who had survived the journey down the Great River to the March Ocean. The two angels had then split up. Brown had gone north. The other, Two-pink-green, had followed the southern shore, and his efforts had met with success. He had been able to convince one tribe of the imminent danger. They informed their great ones, who immediately passed the news to all the others. Then Frith and Pfapff knew what I was trying to do, more or less. Perhaps they were excited at being pathfinders for the great migration. Perhaps they were even ordered by some central great-one leader to go ahead and explore. Who can say?

─♦─

The canyon through the Andes Mountains is one of the wonders of the world, and traveling up it on Frith’s back was the most awe-inspiring journey I was to know on all my wanderings. In many places it churned and roared, with waves standing like hills and great whirlpool mouths howling at us impudent wayfarers, seeking to suck us down to our destruction. Repeatedly I was swept off, helpless as froth, and rescued by Pfapff, who was keeping close behind Frith to guard me. The two great ones reveled in the tumult, at times leaping like roos up the cataracts, although at other times even they needed to seek out calmer pools and rest. As for me, I could only hope that they would take my screams of terror to be shouts of joy, or that those went unheard in the violence of the waves.

This was the route that Violet had intended to sail. We can never know how far he went after leaving me, but a few angels did return to Heaven at about that time and by that road. Their accomplishment shows how greatly the respective levels of the two oceans had changed while I wandered alone on the sands and then dallied among the seafolk.

Yet there were also wide calm places, where the river wound in chasms through barren hills scoured to sterile rock by the higher floods of the past, or cauterized by the heat of summer. Sometimes the river narrowed, with rocky sides rising sheer until the sky was a ragged slit of light shining far above me, reflected on the black stillness as if it were also far below. At those times I seemed to float in air rather than on water. Plumes of cataracts graced the walls, some dropping from heights so great that only mist reached down to dimple the mirrored surface. For long stretches I traveled on dark glass, leaving a narrow, V-shaped wake behind me.

Earlier—at about the time of my birth—the river had been much higher, but I have been assured by the saints that I saw only a part of the canyon. They estimate that it was still about half-full when I went through; at other times the gorge is that much deeper. I have never had any desire to go back and see.

The only more terrible journey I can imagine would be to descend that hellish torrent in an angel chariot. It had never been done so late in the cycle, but it was the fastest route from Heaven to the March Ocean, and with time running out for the seafolk, the archangel had sent his six best sailors. Brown and Pink survived. The names of the other four are recorded on the Scroll of Honor.

We emerged at last from a rift in the mountains onto calm water stretching out of sight in three directions. I thought it must be another ocean, but it was only an inland sea lying to the east of the Andes. On Heaven’s maps it looks very small.

Here I was greeted by a gentle rain, an experience I had almost forgotten, the first shower I had seen since my childhood. It cleared almost at once, to show a nearby hillside clothed in rich grass and bearing real trees.

I was battered and spent, much too weary to think of food. Frith took me to this idyllic shore. I drank deeply at a stream of crystal water, found a dry spot under a bush, and lay like a dead man.

─♦─

I awoke stiff, bruised, and famished. By then the surface of the sea was already dotted with fins and spoutings. Even as I watched, more great ones were emerging from the mouth of the canyon. Of course I did not know about Two-pink-green. I did not know that my mission had been completely unnecessary. I assumed that the honor was mine, and I congratulated myself on being a hero. All Brown need do now was watch as the seafolk were rounded up by the great ones and borne away to safety. That was, indeed, what happened. Unlike the tragic dying in the grasslands, there was no disaster on the March Ocean in this cycle. Not everyone made it—many bodies floated back down the Great River—but most did, and Heaven recorded a success.

Battered and naked and starving, though, the self-hailed hero wanted breakfast. In the tumult of the canyon I had lost everything except my knife and my amulet. I mounted a rock at the water’s edge and hopefully sang Frith’s name. The shore sloped steeply. In a miraculously short time he thrust his head up almost at my feet and tossed me a fish, clicking welcome and amusement. I called out my thanks, greatly relieved that he had not deserted me.

Yet raw fish is a dull diet. After I had taken the edge off my hunger, I began collecting dry leaves from below the densest shrubs and soon worked up a sweat twirling a stick, while I pondered my immediate future.

The passage of the canyon had been a torment for even a strong mount and a relatively skilled rider. Towing coracles of terrified children and pregnant women would be a feat I just could not imagine the tribe achieving without my help. There was not a man I would trust to keep his head. My obvious duty was to return to the March Ocean and take charge.

If Frith refused to go through that hell again—and of course my craven heart hoped that he would refuse—then I could camp quite happily on this hospitable shore. Or so I thought. I could wait for the tribe—great ones and people both. So I thought. Even if I was asleep when they passed through the gates of the mountain, Frith and Pfapff would tell them where I was. They would almost certainly head for this stream anyway, the first fresh water. Whether I went back or stayed, we should be reunited. I would ask Frith, and he would decide. I saw no other possibility.

But I was fairly certain that Frith would take me.

By the time I had worked all that out, I had roasted a piece of my fish on the rocks of my hearth. I skewered it on a stick. With my mouth watering, I rose to my feet to find a comfortable spot, away from the heat.

I had earned this feast, I thought, and a rest in this so-serene campsite. I had earned the joy of smelling grass again, and the soothing shade of real trees, the inspiring view of mountains and shore. This was Paradise, and I longed to share it with Sparkle and my friends.

Above me, the smoke from my fire climbed slowly up the azure sky, visible to half the world.

I think of that moment as the end of my innocence.

—6—
THE ANTS

S
OMETHING HURLED ME DOWN
, spun me over with sharp agony in my shoulder, and then crushed me into the ground. It dug claws into my shoulders and belly. It pushed a black-furred muzzle close to my face. Too dazed and horrified even to scream, I stared up at huge yellow eyes with vertical slits for pupils, at pointed ears, at white teeth as long as my toes. It snarled and spat, and the reek of its breath was nauseating.

“Stay very still,” said a nearby voice, “or it will rip out your guts.”

I rolled up my eyes and pretended to faint. I felt my knife being taken, then the weight moving off me. A boot slammed into my ribs. “Now get up!” Obviously my deception had failed.

I clambered dizzily to my feet. My captor was short and broad, clad in stiff black leather garments, soiled and much patched. Little of his face was visible between a wide leather hat and a bristling beard—both of them black—but I could make out a broad flat nose and evilly glittering eyes.

I clenched my jaw to prevent my teeth from chattering insanely. I was streaming blood. There were claw marks horribly close to my groin. The cause of my injuries was sitting on its haunches near the fire, watching me narrowly with a third yellow, slit-pupil eye, wiping its jowls with one paw. It was furry and black and as large as an adolescent girl. It had eaten my dinner.

“What’s your name?”

“Knobil.”

He kicked my shin—hard. I yelped and staggered. The animal spun around, snarling.

“Address me as ‘master’!”

“Yes, master!”

He nodded. “If you give me any trouble, I’ll have my friend here bite your knackers off. Makes a man more docile—understand?”

“Yes, master!”

“How many more of you are there around?”

“None, master.”

He kicked my other shin—harder. I staggered again and almost fell. The panther crouched threateningly. “The truth!”

Shrill with terror, I insisted that I spoke the truth. I babbled about the angel and the great ones.

He nodded and reached up to the amulet that was the only thing I wore. Checking for valuables, I supposed. “What’s in there?”

“Angel tokens, master.”

He guffawed. “More pilgrims end up in the pit than in Heaven, dross! They won’t help you.” He snapped the tie and contemptuously hurled my precious amulet away. “Now kneel!”

I lowered myself reluctantly under the panther’s steady glare.

“Stay very still. I’m going to have Feather lick those scratches. That stops the bleeding and prevents sickness, but it stings, and if you make any sudden movement, she’ll strike. You have been warned!”

He made a sign with his fingers. Snarling, the monster crept toward me, low to the ground, keeping its forward eyes on mine. Its muzzle came close to my face and I gagged again at its fetid breath. Then a big pink tongue reached out to lap the blood on my savaged shoulder. I felt only a rough scraping until it reached the wound, and then the sudden pain was excruciating, like salt, or fire. I managed not to flinch too much and I did not scream. I was never lucky enough to faint.

I reeled up the valley, following the stream, with the panther close behind me and the man behind her. Thorns ripped my bare skin, rocks cut my feet, and I was in constant danger of vomiting from pain and terror, but I believed every one of the man’s threats, so I just kept moving, as fast as I was able.

We came at last to a small glen where tents nestled under the trees. Half a dozen black-clad men were lounging around, and two more were bathing in the stream. They were all short and broad, with dark porcupine beards. Their faces were burnt red, but the rest of their skin was almost as pale as mine, as I could see from the bathers. Their features were broad, their legs short and bowed, their shoulders broad as mountains. More of the great black cats roused from their slumbers to eye me hungrily.

An older man climbed to his feet. “You got one!”