Part Two
Chapter 15
THE WATERSHED
Monwyrt tentatively tasted the breeze. It was a fine morning, and he arose and immediately set to tidying his camp, relighting the fire, and splashing some water on himself. Now, his simple chores completed for the time being, he stretched and blinked his inner lids, testing the light. When he turned to face the breeze, the keen senses of the hunter bridled.
He could hardly believe it, but there it was: the unmistakable overripe tang and faint chill heralding the passing of another season. The forest was about to rest again, for a time. The blowanslaep was on the ground, the blossoms were soon to close not just overnight, but for a period of several hand-days. Where had the time gone?
He had been in a troubled state of mind since his encounter with Cnawaneall a hand-day ago. Was the old bealcian to be believed? Incredible as the Waeccelang's story was, Monwyrt had to admit that there were points to it that seemed to fit together nicely. Most convincing to his mind were Cnawaneall's unusual powers: the eerie communication (that music business!); the way his hunger had disappeared; those dreams.
What troubled Monwyrt more than his doubt of the authenticity of Cnawaneall was the shadow cast over his mind by the intruding cloud of indecision. What should he do now? The old flotasaec was probably right: Snecchen had more than likely sent him to the Haunted Lands to find the Waeccelang, if she had known. In that case, he should go back and tell her... but then, if she knew, why hadn't she said anything to him about it in the first place? Monwyrt frowned. He wished he could just forget the lot of them.
It was a spectacular morning. The sky had been light for some time but the sun was only just beginning to rise above the mountains and warm the valley where Monwyrt had his camp. A large thriddahype thigh hung over the campfire, which hissed and crackled as the grease dripped into it. Monwyrt appreciatively inhaled the crisp air, rich with smoke, roasting meat, moist soil, sceadutreow leaves - the forest. The treowdwellans, having long since ended their morning riot, now only occasionally called out from their hideaways. The grunddwellan had returned, more than merely tame now that Monwyrt knew he could really talk to it with some understanding, and was scrambling noisily and comically through the camp chasing the bits of food he tossed out from time to time, overturning sticks and stones in its haste. A sphex hummed contemplatingly, now hanging over Monwyrt's head, now over the steaming roast, then back over Monwyrt's head again, before whizzing off downwind. The stream rushed and eddied, swirled and pooled its way along its course; and every blade, leaf, and stone in sight glistened as if alive with the light of the sun shot out in all directions from the bulging droplets of a heavy dew.
The grunddwellan, pouches bulging, scampered off to its burrow. Monwyrt cut a steaming slice of meat from the roast and carried it over to the stream, gingerly tossing it from one hand to the other while it cooled. He sat down on a rather large stone near the water and looked around him, sighing. The forest, the mountains, the sky, the air... a large dewdrop hung heavily on the tip of a nearby low-hanging sceadutreow leaf, catching his eye as it glinted in the sun. He watched it, following its fall when it finally let loose to splatter on a weodhwit blossom below. The shining remnants rejoined and combined with other quivering drops already on the petals, then dripped off onto the green shoots, jumped together with other dewdrops waiting there, and shot down and off the several leaves, each bounding up when relieved of its burden. The shining balls of water hurtled down and shattered on a large flat stone at the edge of the stream, the bouncing globules racing down its uneven, sloping face like so many tiny streams, swelling as they attracted others with that peculiar magnetism, and diving together without hesitation off the edge of the stone into the waiting whirl of the brook.
Monwyrt, in absent reverie, retraced the path of the dewdrop over and over. He was conscious of a feeling that it was silly for this simple act to fascinate him this way, but what did it matter, after all? The falling of a dewdrop - an occurance which repeated itself endlessly all through the forest: unnumbered dewdrops dripping off unnumbered leaves into unnumbered streams... well, not unnumbered streams, perhaps; they were relatively few; but definitely innumerable leaves, innumerable dewdrops. He glanced down the stream. Where was that dewdrop now? Aah, it was pointless... but it must be somewhere.
He closed his eyes. The dew on a leaf; down onto the stone, into the stream... and where? Well, the stream joins another stream, and further down becomes wider yet when other small gullies and ravines empty into it. But Monwyrt had not explored past that point, and he could only guess where the stream went from there.
He laid back in the warm sun, chewing absent-mindedly on his slice of meat. "Eating with my teeth," he said idly to himself, and the incessant but ever-varying bubbling of the water seemed to block out everything else. The streams come together into bigger streams, he reasoned, and the bigger streams join into bigger streams, and then yet bigger, wider streams... Monwyrt frowned again. Could that go on forever? He tried to imagine the brook beside him magnified again and again. The dewdrops come together, and fall down into the water, which runs down the valley. Down, always down...
"It is quite wonderful the way your mind works!" Cnawaneall complimented him.
Monwyrt jumped to his feet, shaking off his daydream.
"Moc!"
"Excellent expression! Universally applicable."
"Where did you come from?" he blurted, adding to himself the thought: "I wish you had a scent!"
"Easily arranged, good fellow!" Cnawaneall slightly inclined his head. "How is that?"
Monwyrt immediately was overwhelmed with an intensely noxious odor. He could barely draw breath. "Uh, uh, uh - no, stop! I didn't mean it!" he cried.
The smell dissipated. "I might caution you against saying things you don't mean!" scolded the Waeccelang.
"I never had to worry about it before. And besides, I didn't say it; I only thought it!"
"Ah, but the way you think - so undisciplined! - you might as well be screaming it out at the top of your lungs as far as I am concerned," rejoined Cnawaneall. "Come. Let me teach you how to conceal your thoughts." The guardian gestured to him.
"Even from you?" Monwyrt asked.
"Who else knows your thoughts?" Cnawaneall teased, adding seriously: "But one never knows: you are emerging; it may be useful to know how to do some day. Come."
Monwyrt wondered, "How shall I know whether I can really disguise my thoughts or Cnawaneall is simply pretending not to hear them?" as he followed the Waeccelang through the forest.
"You won't, my suspicious friend, unless I make the mistake of answering one of your thoughts as I am doing now. But you need not worry: I do not mislead you, and I do not make mistakes!"
"Where are we going?" Monwyrt asked aloud.
"You needn't bother articulating, you know; it doesn't do anything. I don't - what is it? - hear it, I don't hear it at all, physically, that is. I listen, you could say, only to your music, your open thoughts. You always think what you are articulating (and nearly always vice versa) so the illusion was created that I listened to the words you spoke with your mouth. Not so, of course."
"Oh, of course!" Monwyrt thought. "So tell me, where are we going?"
"To my, er, abode."
"Which is where? I was trying to get you to tell me that last time."
"It is here," said Cnawaneall, stopping. "Actually, it is anywhere; but it is simpler for you being out of eyesight of your camp."
"Why is that?"
"So many questions! but that's good, that's all right, never mind. Why is that? It is because less familiar surroundings will be easier for you to abandon."
"Abandon?"
"Er, forget; uh, ignore, leave behind - no, not leave behind, exactly; more like disregard. Never mind: just make yourself at ease."
Monwyrt sat down.
"Gravity! yes, how quaint. Now, close your eyes."
Monwyrt complied. As far as he could tell, nothing happened. He felt a little silly.
"All right. Open your eyes."
Monwyrt gasped. Everything was white, just like in his dream, and he seemed to be uneasily floating with Cnawaneall on a shining fog of some kind; but this time he was wide awake. Cnawaneall shone brightly, and Monwyrt noted with some little satisfaction that he himself had a pleasant, if unnerving, glow about him.
"How did we get here?" he asked, at the same time he thought: "Where are we?"
"We are still right where we were, in the forest near your camp," said Cnawaneall. "But this is the way we - my race, that is - choose to see it. We - you and I, that is - are occupying two states now, sort of; that is, we are partly Libbannawiht, but also repeatedly, er, flashing into the reality of your world for very short moments. We can see your reality, though it is somewhat altered: you may notice an absence of color, I believe."
"But why? Why did we have to come here?"
"Oh, well, we didn't have to. I wanted to show it to you, and I hope you may discover that you will be better able to concentrate here. It may not be easy for you to learn to control your music, you see."
"I feel sick."
"How wonderful!" Cnawaneall seemed genuinely delighted. "Tell me, what is it like?"
"Never mind - let's just get on with it. What do I do?"
"All right. What you need to do is force yourself to think of two things at once. That's the main thing. Can you do that?"
"I don't know. Why?"
"The stronger thought overrides the weaker thought, and the weaker thought does not penetrate. Understand?"
"No." Monwyrt's stomachs were quite unsteady; this floating feeling had not been so pronounced in his dream, or something, but now he was getting queasy.
"Try to answer me only in thought, Monwyrt, and as you answer in thought, think of something else besides. It's easier than you might think. All right? Try it."
Monwyrt swallowed heavily; his morning meat was on the prowl and it was hard to think of anything else, but he tried to reply to Cnawaneall's prompting. "I'm trying to think an answer for you. Can you hear me, or whatever?"
Cnawaneall was confused. The Waeccelang had an unusual sensation stealing through the assumed form, and was having trouble identifying it. "Monwyrt, are you paying attention? Answer me in thought, and try to think of something else at the same time."
Monwyrt could have said something about simultaneously occupying two states of being while thinking two thoughts at once, but he felt sure he was about to vomit and it was hard enough to come up with the one thought he did, which he expressed rather desperately: "Take me back!"
Cnawaneall could not understand what was happening to the assumed form, or why Monwyrt was not responding. Monwyrt was supposed to think two thoughts; the Waeccelang would receive one of them and tell Monwyrt which was the dominant thought, they would try again, and so on, until Monwyrt got the hang of masking his true thoughts with false dominant ones. At least, that was the idea. But instead, the Waeccelang was coming all over queer, and Monwyrt was turning a paler shade of white.
"Take me b-- " Monwyrt began, but too late. Violent nausea swept over him, and he painfully retched up and deposited an amazing sparkly white detritus into the billowy foam. "Bah!" he spat when he had finished, and looked up at an astounding sight.
Cnawaneall had assumed an identical position, and was at that moment trying vainly to bark up some relief, too. Monwyrt laughed out loud as he realized what must have happened: obviously, nausea had been his dominant thought.
Cnawaneall was not equally amused, and moaned: "I had to ask what it felt like to be sick, hadn't I?"
Monwyrt laughed again, and thought: "I might caution you against asking for things you don't want."
"Point conceded," said Cnawaneall. "Can you continue?"
"Can you?"
"Physical existence can be quite repulsive, can it not?" commented Cnawaneall. "Nevertheless, let us try again."
Monwyrt proved to be quite adept at the technique, once he understood what it was about, and after some practice Cnawaneall pronounced him satisfactorily deceptive. The next, more subtle, step was to master the art of thinking of nothing, and the seemingly contradictory act of projecting that as the dominant thought.
This was a different story. Monwyrt was pitifully maladroit at it. The harder he tried, the more he wound up thinking about thinking about nothing as his dominant, while thinking about thinking about thinking about nothing trailed along as his recessive. It reached the point where he couldn't force anything else into his mind any which way, so heavily invested was he in this maddening spiral of blank concentration. Cnawaneall finally threw up his hands in frustration and mercifully ended the session. Monwyrt held his head in his hands.
When he looked up, the color had returned to the forest and he was sitting on solid ground again.
"I was afraid of that," Cnawaneall said regretfully.
"Thanks for trying it, anyway," Monwyrt thought with bitterness, but said: "Oh, my head! How can you think of nothing? And if it can be done, how can you think a second thought at the same time? Oh, never mind; just let me go back to my camp."
"Yes, nothing is a heavy burden. I was afraid that perhaps you were not ready yet, and you are not. The conception of nothing, Monwyrt, is a bold and dangerous thing. It has been quite easy for us to do - my race, that is - for a long time; ever since we willingly forsook physical life to reside in the void. I say willingly though we had no real choice in the matter; but that's neither here nor there as far as you're concerned. The point is this, Monwyrt: what you cannot even force your conscious mind to imagine - that is to say: nothing - is the entire being of my race.
"You cannot fully appreciate the totality of it, I'm sure. All - all! - that exists for us is the music, and even that must needs be a consensus, uniform, inoffensive. Yes, the consensus changes from time to time, beauty transmogrifies, you know, beyond reason, shockingly, only to reveal itself reassuringly through its new mask. But even these sweeping, swooping, capricious whims of beauty have become predictable to us, our self-knowledge is so complete, our memory so deep.
"That is why your joy, pain, dexterity, confusion - why your life, Monwyrt gives me such vicarious pleasure. I envy you your mortality. We - the Waeccelang, that is - envy you all..."
Monwyrt had been only half-heartedly trying to follow Cnawaneall's message, and was thoroughly in the woods over this last confession. It seemed to him that every time he encountered the Waeccelang he was thrown into a depressing blend of guilt, apprehension, and perplexity, and he was tired of it. Really tired of it.
"What's the point?" he demanded testily.
"Point?"
"Point?" Monwyrt mimicked sarcastically. "You know everything, you know what I mean.
"What's your point?" he repeated loudly, rebelliously. "Why are you telling me all this? What am I supposed to do? You say I am the only one who can see you or hear you; that I am the first of some kind of new brood. You fill me full of your bloodless lore, teach me some kind of mind trick that I can only practice, I guess, on myself: what for? So what if you come from some dryge nether-place? Who cares? I am here, now; you say you are nowhere, or everywhere, I can't figure out which; you drag me there, wherever, waking and sleeping, to show me around: why? Am I supposed to become like you? Am I supposed to tell everyone what you're teaching me? I'd be wet and dried before I got my mouth shut again, just like Smaelaer - I may not know everything like you do, but I know that much! So tell me, now, what the idea is behind this dance we've been doing, - or leave me alone!
Monwyrt was hot. His stomachs still hurt from his earlier exertions, and his head throbbed.
Yes, Cnawaneall thought privately, perhaps it is best. I have shown him more than he can grasp, but he has learned what are, for him, I think, the important things. At least he remembers his Smaelaer. Sometimes I almost think the Statists are right - no, of course I don't mean that. We knew it would be frustrating to deal with these new ones -and ah! frustration is something after all, isn't it? But as Monwyrt himself might say, I should be happy that I know I am frustrated and that it really doesn't matter.
"You are right, Monwyrt," Cnawaneall answered. "In your reality, I have found you to have keen, er, instincts - yes, keen instincts, and again they have led you truly to the mark, when I have strayed. You are right!
"Good-bye."
When Monwyrt awoke the sun was past its mid-day peak. He jumped to his feet, alarmed. Where was the Waeccelang? Bah, who cares? Nevertheless, he scanned the forest for some sign of Cnawaneall. Nothing.
He hesitatingly, and somewhat reluctantly, turned to go back to camp. He was surprised at the sense of disappointment he felt; he was angry with himself for losing his temper; he was simultaneously relieved and aggrieved at the thought that perhaps the Waeccelang was indeed gone for good.
But he would rather have had it that his questions had been answered to his satisfaction, than ignored like that. What was he supposed to do?
He knew his duty to the Giestranweard would have him report all this. What would Snecchen do with the knowledge, he wondered? Perhaps she, in her position, could get away with talking about it without being named cnawannawiht, but perhaps not. It was pretty incredible, even to him, even yet; and to someone who never pokes his head out of the caves - an Yldra, for instance - it would be ludicrous.
What was his duty to his tribe? He tried to imagine any possible advantage this lore could give them, and he could not. He'd never had a high opinion of lore in the first place, and his recent experiences seemed so far removed from the life of the Traeppedelferes as to be laughable. The Yldras would not be pleased for everyone to learn that Smaelaer was not cnawannawiht, he was sure of that point, at least. He was also sure that any mention of his being of some new race (although he was inclined to doubt that himself) would not be wise. What could he say, then? Tell all to Snecchen, and trust to her discretion? Monwyrt frowned.
What would Cnawaneall want him to do? He wished he had got an answer to that. Did he have some duty to the Waeccelang? He didn't feel that way, not like he did towards his tribe, or even toward Snecchen. Cnawaneall had been an imposition on him from the start. Some things in his mind had been cleared up, though: his thriddahype calls; why he didn't fall to drygeslaep. Perhaps it was true, somehow: that he was different from the others. Not a new race entirely, that was too much to say; but perhaps he was different.
If that is true, Monwyrt went on reasoning to himself, did he have a duty to himself? He had always used the most convenient means to please himself in the past, but he had always felt bad about it; or at least a little guilty. He remembered exploring the mountains as a hunter when he should have been setting traps. It occured to him now that nothing but disaster lay in store for him if his story were told in the caves - did he have a duty to himself to suppress it? He could lie to Snecchen; say he found nothing in the Haunted Lands (which, he smiled to himself, was in one way true enough); deny everything - he could, he thought; but should he?
All these questions piled helter-skelter on top of each other in his mind during the short walk back to camp. And all these questions immediately flew out of his mind altogether when he looked up and saw what was happening.
It had been some time since he had left his fire unnattended, and it had burned out, but not before setting one leg of the tripod, from which hung the joint, ablaze, eventually burning through, causing the whole thing to topple over. Now, the fire was out and cold, and the meat lay beside it on the ground. But that was not what surprised him.
What he saw was that the tame grunddwellan, having eaten its fill and scampered off earlier, had now returned and, apparently, brought along some two or three hands of its friends and relations. They chattered busily, practically swarming over the camp in general, and the thriddahype meat in particular, and nosing through Monwyrt's gear, helping themselves to anything which appeared to them to be edible. It was clear to Monwyrt (he didn't stop to consider why it was so clear) that they considered his camp as their playground, and his food, theirs also. He stood amazed at their brazenness, and watched for some time. They were aware of his return; but obviously weren't concerned, and went about their raid as if he wasn't there.
"That does it!" he said to himself as he began collecting his things together, waving off the little thieves with a snarl. "I've got to get out of here before I go gemaed."
He added half-seriously: "If it isn't too late now!"
Late in the day Monwyrt felt better. He had quickly fallen into his trail pace, and his trail diet of water and weodthuf, and the movement had done him some good. He had been too long at that camp, almost four hand-days, and the walking had taken his mind off... things. As the land was still familiar to him from his recent ramblings, and the day was fair, he had decided to walk late into the twilight. He wanted to put as much distance between himself and the camp as he could manage. It was suddenly important to him to leave the Haunted Lands.
It was quite dark and all the stars were out when he finally broke his pack for the night. He had stopped near the stream at a pleasant spot that he had once remarked would make a good campsite, and his observation certainly seemed to hold up. There was a nice dry level space on which to roll up in the skins, and the running water and the treowdwellans conspired to produce a most satisfactory lullaby.
He was reminded of his daydream of that morning, and wondered again the whereabouts of his dewdrop. Just downstream was where the stream was joined by another stream, and then...
He awoke the next day with the treowdwellans screaming in his ears, and the first glow of dawn showing behind the mountains. In a moment he had his gear rolled up and was on his feet. He went to the stream to drink, and as he finished he hesitated a moment, face dripping into its own reflection, poit, poit, poit. He shook his head and started off.
After a brisk run he found the branch in the stream he expected. The stream joining in here came from the direction of the caves, the direction he would follow on the way back. Looking downstream as far as he could see, he turned to follow the new brook upstream, and started off at a trot. The trot soon slowed to a walk, though, and the walk to a tortured halt, before he had got out of sight of the junction. He looked up, he looked back the way he had come, he looked down. The caves. The Haunted Lands.
And the other way.
A comfortable, mischievous smile stole across Monwyrt's face as he turned around, retraced his steps back to the confluence, and started downstream into new territory.
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