Part Three
Chapter 29
THRESHOLD OF WATER
Indecision.
He stood atop a small knoll, one of the first, most distant foothills of the looming mountains, and gazed ahead at a compelling panorama. He could see the end of the shoam! Real sceadutreow forests blanketed the lower foothills above him, but still a day's or two days' run ahead. He could taste the rich tantalizing musky scent of the forest; he could almost feel the cool shadows of the deep beds of weodasur around the smooth boles of the sceadutreows. After the shimmering heat and mind-numbing austerity of the plain the temptation to run off into the forest was almost overwhelming.
But there was another new tinge to the wind, one which Monwyrt had been expecting. The biting aridity of the air was being defanged by a fresh, soft hint of moisture. The dry season would soon be over. The rains would be upon him in a hand-day or so, he knew from his discussions with Nuzhunpa, and the river would swell out of its banks. As confident a riverum as he had become in the last few days, he did not want to hazard a flood in a craft as small as a batohram. The stories he had heard about floods had impressed him. If he would take a few days from his journey to explore those new forests, he might have to wait for hand-days before he could get back onto the river again.
Complicating things was the fact that the river below him apparently did not flow directly through the mountains, but made a wide turn to skirt the foothills and disappeared into the distance, a natural divider between the plain and the mountains, as far as he could see. He had to follow the river, but he wanted to run in the forest again, and he could not do both.
But another thing which had been concerning him lately was his dwindling supply of food. The pahnbatohn had run out a few days ago - he had stretched it as far as he could - and the dried vashlymoss was beginning to disappear too rapidly to suit him. He had been sorely tempted to attempt to snare one many nights, but he realized that even if he succeeded in the kill, there was no fuel with which to build a fire to roast and cure it. But ahead lay the forest, and doubtless fuel in abundance, and his mouth watered and his predatory instincts itched. If only it were a different time of the season!
The sun glared down yet, though, as if in contempt of the changing season, or defiance of the coming rains; and the shoam all around Monwyrt waved and clacked together in the light breeze, and he turned glumly to descend the hill and return to the riverbank where he had grounded his batohram. He had to. If he was going to be caught in the wet season somewhere, he reasoned, he might as well get as far downriver as he could before then. He would just have to make the food last. But a sudden whiff of a scent from the foothills brought him up short before he had reached the bottom of the hill.
Thriddahype!
He ran back to the top of the knoll, tasting the air as he ran. There could be no mistake! Thriddahype! His mind was made up in an instant, for better or worse. This new allure was too much to resist. Excitedly, he ran down to the batohram, pulled it far up the bank, slung his ready pack across his shoulder, slapped the knife still laced to his thigh, and turned to go. He soon returned to the river, though, laughing and rather ashamed of himself: he had forgotten to fill his water-skin. This accomplished, he was ready; and he ran off to the forest as fast as he could push through the shoam, keen on the hunt.
Five days later, Monwyrt sat beneath his stretched skin, surveying his camp with a mixture of satisfaction and irritation.
His thriddahype call had worked as well as ever, and he had made two kills almost immediately upon reaching the forest three days ago. The roast thriddahype had tasted better than he thought it was possible for thriddahype to taste, and he had even found some weodthuf to bake, and a clear, lively brook near his camp. The meat was drying in the smoke of his fire, his stomachs were full, and he would have plenty of food to continue his journey for several hand-days at least. Everything had worked out as well as he could have dared hope for.
Except the weather.
The light but steady rain had set in the day before, and showed no sign of letting up. Monwyrt had no trouble keeping his fire lit, though, so he decided to stay in his camp until the meat was thoroughly dried. He grumbled to himself. The worst part of it was that he had known this would happen. He didn't have anything to blame for this delay but his own stupidity.
But the more he thought about it, the less dangerous the river seemed, even in the rain. He couldn't see the river from his camp, of course, but he didn't think the water could have risen too much with the rain as light as it had been, and he resolved to try the batohram again as soon as he could, despite the weather. And the next day, the weather itself seemed ready to cooperate: the sun broke through the opening sceadutreow leaves in misty beams as the treowdwellans announced the day to Monwyrt. Heartened, he broke camp and began his return to the Luhvluhv.
The river didn't seem any different after his hand-and-two day absence from it, except his batohram was closer to the water's edge than he thought he had left it, which puzzled him. But everything else was in order, and Monwyrt soon had his gear stowed away and was pushing off with the pairsh, into the clear light of a new day.
The rain had refreshed things everywhere. The sun shone just as brightly as ever, but the air felt thick and cool, and the shoam was less brittle and rustled, rather than clacked, in the breeze. Monwyrt could hear the rustling shoam from great distances; he was awash in the sound of it. The plain exuded a new, heavier scent. Even the sky seemed more intense than before, as if rinsed of its impurities. The river, too, was rejuvenated.
Monwyrt realized too late that the light rain had quite a deceptive affect on the river. It was somewhat deeper, but the increased current was much greater than the added depth had suggested to him. When he reached the very center of the river he was surprised to find that his pairsh would no longer touch bottom. But the flow was not turbulent even if it was rapid, and he shrugged his shoulders, put the pairsh in its rack, and lay down to enjoy the ride.
The river bore him along faster than he realized. He sat up with delight when he saw the foothills rising not only on the one hand but on the other as well, and discovered that he was already further downriver than he had been able to see from the knoll. Before he knew it, the forest had descended the hills almost to the riverbanks, and the rocks and boulders of the mountains were hesitantly revealing themselves here and there through the loamy soil.
By mid-day the sky had begun to cloud over again, and Monwyrt was surprised to feel something like a chill come over him when the sunlight faded. Then, in mid-afternoon, it started to rain again, and this time it was not a light rain, but a sudden, drenching cloudburst which was soon over. Monwyrt peeked out from underneath the skin with which he had covered the batohram to avoid swamping it with rainwater, and sucked in his breath in alarm.
The mountains had drawn in steeply on both sides of the river, and the riverbanks were now mostly gravel and rock. The river was roaring along a slightly narrower channel, no longer peaceful, though still relatively even on its surface. Monwyrt thought that this new velocity was the doing of the rainstorm that had just ended, and reasoned to himself that if the river rose that quickly in response to the rain, it should just as quickly subside when the rain was over. Nevertheless, he was uneasy, and decided to try to get his boat to shore.
The pairsh proved to be virtually worthless in fast water, and he soon returned it to its bracket, and tried the ram. He struggled to steer the small craft toward first one bank, then the other, but without success. Always, just when he thought he was about to reach calmer water, an unanticipated eddy would sweep him back out, or an unseen rock would deflect the batohram away, and he would find himself fighting the strong current again.
The steep banks were rapidly growing into high walls, and Monwyrt looked up at the darkening late afternoon sky between two increasingly towering masses of stone. He realized suddenly that he could not scale the banks even if he could reach them, and his heart sank like a rock, and he felt sick. He was trapped in a small boat on a raging torrent through a great rift right through the mountains, and he knew his only chances lay in the bouyancy of his craft, and luck. He shouldered his pack, huddled down as low as he could get, clutched the gunwales, and watched.
The river swept through a chute cut in solid stone. As Monwyrt wondered what would become of him, he saw the cliffs on either side come closer, closer, and the river ran faster and faster, but still strangely smooth. Then, he heard a terrific roaring, awfully loud and deep, which made him think at once of a waterfall, but when he forced his eyes to look ahead he was astonished. Instead of a waterfall, the river appeared to rise up! At the end of a long, narrow passage ahead, he could see a great mass of white, raging foam, beyond which the surface of the river was wide, calm, and some two-hands hands higher! The batohram was sucked toward the gap irresistably and shot through. "Tungebunge!" Monwyrt cried, but he couldn't hear his own voice over the roar of the jump.
He was blinded by the spray, and the little craft was swamped with it, but somehow, miraculously, it rode the white water up the improbable rise.
Monwyrt found himself, blinking stupidly, sitting in a hand of bilge, on the surface of a wide, calm, quiescent lake, facing back toward the rapids. This lake was surrounded on three sides, more or less, by the mountains, rising sheer and sudden from the water. Monwyrt reached for the ram to turn himself around and discovered that it had been lost. The pairsh, though, was still there, clamped alongside, and he managed to swing the craft about to see what lay behind him. When he did, he was stunned.
There was nothing there.
The setting sun was glinting off the surface of the lake into Monwyrt's eyes, peeping out from under the clouds way off in the distance. It was torching the sky with spectacular striations of color, and turning the water to gold. The smooth lake stretched on three, maybe four stone tosses, Monwyrt judged, no more.
But there it just ended. There was no shore; there was no mountain; no forest, nothing. The water ended, and the distant sky began, all the way across the width of the lake from one hand to the other. Monwyrt, unsure of his eyes, blinked again.
Then, he heard it.
There was a waterfall, after all. A mammoth waterfall. It stretched the whole width of the lake, and was apparently so high that Monwyrt could not see over the edge to anything below the horizon. He was almost frozen with fear when he realized that the batohram was slowly drifting closer to the edge. Where was that ram?! The pairsh was not long enough to touch bottom, but Monwyrt clung on to it desperately, irrationally, trying to paddle with it, thrusting it in vain against the inexorable current drawing him ever closer, closer to the precipice. The noise was unbearable. At long last the pairsh struck something solid, and Monwyrt looked up with feverish eyes to see what, if anything, he could do. He finally saw the land far below at the bottom of the falls, but only for an instant, before he had to return his attention to the boat.
He was dangerously close to the edge, but here the lip of the falls jutted up, nearly walling in the lake, and giving him something to push against. He found he could just barely work the batohram along the lip toward the near bank by pushing back into the current at an angle, and catching the lip again in a new place a few hands further down. He slowly, carefully, meticulously proceeded along the very edge of the great falls, his heart racing madly, his ears numb with the roar of the water, his hands wet and slippery with water and sweat. There! Another two or three hands pushes with the pairsh...
"Moc!"
The pairsh got stuck. He had driven it under the water, against the lip of the falls, and it had wedged itself between two rocks or into a crack or something, and Monwyrt was stuck. Any movement side to side would start the batohram swinging around, and he dared not pull on it, because that would be sure to bring the craft to the edge. But he had to do something.
While his mind was racing to discover some means of escape, the river was slowly but forcefully easing the batohram closer and closer to the pairsh, despite Monwyrt's most valiant efforts to deny it. At last, he found himself clutching the pole, now vertical though still tightly jammed underwater, with both hands, while trying to control the wayward boat with his feet, trying to keep it against the pairsh, held there by the current. He hovered there, balanced, on the teetering edge of the mighty falls, for what seemed to him a lifetime. The red sun sank below the horizon.
But the river, relentless, would have its way. Finally, pushing against the wedged pairsh with a force concentrated by the length of the batohram, the fragile balance was overmastered. The craft noiselessly disappeared over the rim, dropping away out from underneath Monwyrt's feet, disappearing into the spray. The pairsh, with Monwyrt desperately clinging on to it, slowly leaned out over the edge until, stuck beyond all hope of retrieval, it stopped almost straight out on a level with the lake. The helpless Traeppedelfere was suspended over nothing that he could see but roaring water and crashing foam, far, far below.
Monwyrt stared down at the grey mist. He no longer heard the crashing water: everything was silent; utterly silent. His hands, clamped in a death-grip on the pairsh, were numb - was he slipping? he couldn't feel. He looked up to check, but what did it matter? He couldn't hang there forever. The thongs of his pack bit into his shoulders; why had he put it on? His eyes were flooded with persiration, or tears, or spray - he couldn't even see his hands. It was getting dark, too.
He could swim. He knew how to swim. The current over the falls was too strong to swim against, though; and besides, he knew there was no place to swim to up there, even if he could somehow climb back over the rim of the lake. But below... Monwyrt closed his eyes tight. He would just drop - how far could it be? No, don't look: just do it! Let go. Let go. Let go...
A high whining sound filled his head, deafening, ear-splitting after the silence. He shook his head to get rid of it; it was still there. He opened his eyes and looked up - he could not let go; his hands would not let go! They were one with the pairsh, fused to it by the white heat of terror. Monwyrt kicked his legs futilely. They felt leaden. The whine intensified. He kicked again, and again, bouncing slightly at the end of the flexing pairsh, and still his stone hands clung tightly. He closed his eyes to concentrate his efforts on shaking himself loose, and kicked again. He was cold. His head was bursting with that keen knife-edged whine. He bounced again; up and down, up and down, up and down... Suddenly, he looked up to sunshine! he was in the blaorzh vaisoh - his first time on the water. There was the camp; over there, the Ealdlazay Fair. The vaisoh bobbed up and down: he felt rather sick and light-headed. But there was Zholybet -
Crck!
The pairsh snapped somewhere behind the water. The sound of it exploded in Monwyrt's ears, driving the whine out of his head instantly, and ushering in the roaring of the falls again. His eyes opened instinctively only to see himself being swung into the dark blank wall of the torrent. The cold water swallowed him whole. He let go of the pairsh, he thought: at any rate he was no longer hanging in the air. He didn't know where he was for a moment: up, down, or sideways. But then his back and head struck something very, very hard.
It was raining, and the sun was shining, but the rain was going up, not coming down. He looked down; the water bubbled up out of the dirt and shot up into the sky, faster and faster. No one seemed to notice. It began to carry bits of dirt with it in its haste; most of the dirt fell back, but some was bounced around far up into the blue, blue sky. The red sky. It was red now, but it was rapidly getting muddy. And still the rain shot up - sheets of it, now. Everyone was wet underneath, and covered with mud falling down. Monwyrt noticed that the top of his feet were dry and clean. That was all. Just the top of his feet.
The mud stung. It felt hard - no, it was pebbles, stones, not mud. The ground all around him, and as far as he could see through the storm, was being eroded away. They were all slowly being lowered into the ground, and covered with mud and stones and - and teeth! He clamped his hand over his mouth, and bent over to shield his face from the falling teeth. But the water, blasting up out of the ground now, pelted his down-turned face with more stones and teeth. The mud was all gone: there was no more dirt, it was all in the sky. The sun shone sticky through the gooey dripping sky, great globs of mud forcing their way down through the escaping rain, knocking him to his knees when it splattered on his back.
How the teeth shone when he looked closely at them! The mud did not stick to them, the red running mud seemed to shun them, these tiny glistening points. Everywhere, folk went on with their ordinary business, oblivious to the fact that they were being buried in the sticky red mud. They blithely greeted one another as if it was a beautiful day to drown on. Monwyrt called out to them, "Climb! Swim! Stay above the mud!" but they didn't seem to hear him. He hastily began gathering up all the teeth he could reach. The teeth could save him, he knew; the sticky red mud flowed away from the teeth. The goo sucked at his feet while vomiting up into his face. He hunched over, frantically scooping up great armloads of the bright teeth.
When he stood, it was over.
Everyone was gone. He, Monwyrt, was the only one left in a landscape of hard rock slippery with red slime. The sun was black, a cold spot of death in a clear black sky. "The rain put out the sun," he thought. He stood upright. The rain had stopped rising, the mud had stopped falling. Darkness was on everything in the distance, but his armload of shining teeth illuminated the space before him. He took a tentative step forward.
"No!" every voice cried out in alarm against him, every voice, every one; in one great, terrifying, beautiful voice. He stopped immediately, and they were silent again. There was no one to be seen in the small circle of the light of the teeth, and he took another, smaller, step. "No!" they cried again, a haunting, fearful plea. "Why?" he asked in a thin, hollow whine. He was ashamed of the sound of his voice compared with the richness of the others'. But the voices wailed and quailed, and howled and sobbed and begged, at the sound of his thin little self, and seemed to be overcome with terror of him. Of him! And they were even more wonderful to experience in their terror and cacophony than before. He took another step.
"No! No! No! No!" they shrieked and groveled, no longer in unison, but in uncontrolled outbursts of pleading hopeless despair which Monwyrt found so beautiful that he thought his heart would burst with it. "Why?" he asked again, to renewed and amplified outpourings of grief even yet more wonderful, more beautiful, more satisfying.
"Why?" A single voice, strangely familiar, yet vague, repeated his question. Monwyrt saw a point of light growing before him, a dazzling light, a blinding light in the utter blackness of this hard land. Soon, as the light advanced, the cold rock shone red, and the stars, invisible before, glowed faintly. "Why?" the voice from the light repeated, louder, still approaching. "Death!"
Monwyrt trembled. "Am I dead?" he gasped, hardly able to control the breath it took to whisper the question.
"Are you dead?" the voice mocked him. "No. You can not die."
"I don't understand!" Monwyrt cried, raising gales of howling anguish amongst the voices.
"You can not die," they all cried together, in agony. "No, you can not die! You can not die!"
The brilliant light came nearer yet, filling Monwyrt's sight. "I don't understand!" he said again. "Why can't I die?"
"Because," the voice boomed, rushing over Monwyrt, the intense light engulfing him completely, leaving the Traeppedelfere blinking, floating in the brilliant white infinite expanse. The hard dark land was turned inside out and voided instantaneously. Monwyrt whirled, and faced the shining figure of a Libbannawiht, speaking now with the unmistakeable harsh and grating bark of Haegtesse! "You are Death itself!" it thundered. "You can not die!"
"No!" Monwyrt screamed, instinctively holding the teeth before him for protection. But it was not teeth in his hands, it was a knife! And such a knife as he had never seen: the blade was six hands long, and keen front and back, with a handle to fit both his hands perfectly. And, more wondrous yet, it emitted a light to rival the other's, and the two lights clashed, and everything exploded, and the voices cried and wailed in a death-call that froze Monwyrt's heart with its beauty.
And then he recognized it.
It was the music.
He lowered his blade. Its light immediately went out, and it became heavy in his hands. He dared not set it down; that would dull the marvelously keen edges, but he could not even lift it now with only one hand. It was getting heavier and heavier all the time.
But he could not run fast enough with it. They were catching up to him. He would have to stand and fight. Swish! the blade severed the first one's head cleanly. Monwyrt wanted to watch the teeth pop out, he wanted to watch the head bounce and loll about, but he didn't have time: they were coming, more were coming. Swish! Swish! Swish! Three more heads - not bright and shining any more but just cold baggage. Swish, swish, swish, swish - what was wrong with them? Why didn't they stop? "No!" he called out to them. "Why?" they cried back, and just kept on coming. Swish, swish, swish.
One of them did stop, though, and even as Monwyrt's blade cut them down, this one stopped to gather up the scattering teeth. Swish, swish, swish. Monwyrt's arms were tired, he was tired, he wanted to stop this senseless slaughter, but they kept coming; he had to do it, and he couldn't put the wonderful knife down. Swish, swish, swish - the plain was littered with toothless heads, piles of them, grinning crazily, as far as far as far. The one looked up with an armload of teeth, smiling blankly.
He was a Traeppedelfere!
Monwyrt blinked, and looked again. They were all Traeppedelferes! He was overcome with bitterness. Why did he have to be Death?
A roar of dry voices rose up behind him. The Laizuvrians were attacking, flooding the shore of the Ealdlazay Fair from their vaisohs, brandishing sharpened pelkrots and deadly fos. The Traeppedelferes were still coming, and the Laizuvries were screaming furiously to meet them. Monwyrt suddenly wanted nothing but to get away, even if it meant dying to do it. He rushed over to the stupidly grinning Traeppedelfere, slapped the load of glittering teeth out of his arms, and thrust the handle of the great blade into his hands. "Now," he told him, "you are Death!"
The battle was over. There had been no battle. The mountains were cool and the air was fragrant. Monwyrt's eyes were glazed: he could just see the glittering teeth in front of him, nothing else. But on focusing his eyes, he realized that the sparkle was not from teeth after all. There was a beautiful warm pool before him, glinting sunlight off its rippled surface. At the center of the ripples leapt a truhthalig.
"Follow the truhthalig."
He felt a strange emptiness, an entirely foreign feeling to him, a mourning he should not have felt in this beautiful place. The mountain forest all around this calm pool was all he ever could have hoped for, but he was unsatisfied.
"Follow the truhthalig."
He looked up into a clear sky, and around him at the welcoming mountains. He looked down at the water. Something was behind him that he could not see, though. What was behind him? It seemed that he knew what it was, but he just couldn't remember, and when it came down to it, he was afraid to turn around and look.
"Follow the truhthalig."
Something was behind him. Something big. Something he wanted to get away from, for some reason. What was it? Why couldn't he just turn around and see? What was going on? He was getting very anxious. He was breathing heavily, perspiring, wet with sweat, soaked! No, not from sweat - he had jumped into the pool; jumped in to escape. He could swim! He swam underwater, away from... whatever it was. Down, down, it was warm, and he was so tired, so very, very tired...
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