Part Four
Chapter 38
CATHARSIS
The shiny glint of the truhthalig receded into the crystaline depths faster than Monwyrt could follow, but stayed within his sight. The further he dove from the surface, the warmer the water became: intoxicatingly lulling. He stroked rapidly, plunging deeper and deeper, intently watching the tail of the creature below him in the failing light, without understanding his fey mood. The water pressed his ears painfully, its heat dazed him. Just when even his libidinous sensualist side was about to decide he couldn't stand it any more, the truhthalig disappeared into a dark opening in the wall of the pool. Monwyrt swam to it, irresistibly drawn, and looked in.
The rock wall was hot. The opening seemed to be a cave, apparently slanting up, but he couldn't see far into it. It was very dark. Hesitant, but unable to turn away, he swam in. He opened his inner lids instinctively. There was the truhthalig, disappearing into the darkness overhead. He pushed himself up off the hot walls of the passageway and sped after it. The tunnel narrowed slightly and he seemed to go faster, although he had not tried to speed up. It soon became completely dark up ahead. His chest was pounding. He did not like this. The tunnel suddenly became narrower yet. His hands were burning; the water was unbearably hot. Suddenly, overwhelmingly, he felt he simply had to get out.
He tried to turn around in the tight channel. But it was too late. When he got his face down toward the entrance to the tunnel, he realized that there was a current in the water forcing him through from behind. It was surprisingly strong. He decided to go on - he had to move one way or the other soon - and swim with the flow. He pushed off again, and kicked. Without warning the current suddenly sped up, and rammed him brutally into the wall.
In an instant, he realized that he was stuck: wedged tight into a yet smaller constriction of the tunnel. His lungs were heaving - he didn't have much time, and for a moment he could not understand what was holding him back. Then it dawned on him: his pack made him too big to fit through the hole.
His arms, poised above his head to ward off the walls, were past the restriction already, and he struggled in the pitch blackness of the hot, cramped passage to contort them into a position where he could reach the thongs over his shoulders. After what seemed days to the trapped twatunge, he succeeded in stretching the wet thongs to his mouth; and he gnawed and chewed them through at last. The pent-up force of the current shot him out as soon as the pack was released, and he wildly pushed and kicked and swam his way up into the darkness.
Beyond all hope, his head burst through the surface of the water.
He tried to find something to hang onto while he gasped the damp, stale air, but there was nothing but smooth, hard, slippery stone. He seemed to be inside a chamber of sorts; where, he did not know, but his Traeppedelferean senses knew a cave when they encountered one. He was underground. The flow of the hot water lifted him right out of the long tunnel and shoved him into a kind of trough. He could not see anything. He was unable to stop: there was nothing to get a grip on that he could reach. The water swirled about him, warm, urging him gently on, on, down through the smooth passageway worn through solid black stone through uncounted seasons. The tunnel twisted and turned, swelled and shrank, slowed to relatively deep pools and careened madly down terrifyingly steep falls. He was caressed deleriously, slammed into unyielding rock, mesmerized by long, smooth slides, and dropped spluttering head over heels into deep water. But always the water bore him down and on through the black innards of the mountains.
There was nothing he could do. Monwyrt knew that it would be impossible to climb back out the way he had come, even if he could manage somehow to come to a stop and turn around. He could only hope the passageway led out somewhere. In a horrible moment he recalled his conception of the end of the river at the bottom of the world: dark and deep underground. It was a terrible thought here, plummeting down inside the mountains to an unknown destination. He was overwhelmed with dread. He fell into a kind of fatalistic trance, allowing his mind to accept the dark menace of his fate as he was allowing his body to accept the unseen windings of the tunnel. He took each breath expecting it to be his last. And the twisting, turning, slippery wet tunnel teased, tossed, and threw him on and on.
How long had he been in this torrent, this nightmarish chute? A generation, a lifetime! The hot water began to feel cool to him, the darkness seemed light. His head spun, hopelessly dizzied and disoriented; he felt battered, pounded, stretched and sore: and it was all right! It felt natural, somehow - this should happen; no, this had to happen!
This was the way of things, this passage; it had ceased to be simply an accidental blunder on his part, it was a part of his life - it was his life - it was life. He couldn't recall any other way. This was beginning and end: past and future destroying themselves in a cataclysmic collision creating the present.
Monwyrt could hear the crash approaching, he could see the white glare it gave off, brighter and brighter. In a final swirling fury, the water heaved him jarringly against a slab of solid rock jutting across the splash - and into a large, bright cavern filled with a strange roar reminiscent of... what?
"Whoa-ha! what's this? what's this? Ah! Monwyrt! There you are! Well now, well now, well now - are you - what is it? drowned? yes, that's the word, isn't it? Are you drowned, or just thoroughly wetted? Rather thoroughly, I'd say. I told you that was some trip, eh? Eh? Some trip, wasn't it? Well now, well now, well now. Don't just lay there like a - what is it? - never mind. The point is: get up! Come on, let's dry you off, Monwyrt, and get you something to, er - oh, yes! to eat, something to eat, dacoar? I mean, icsee? oh, you know. Um? that's it."
Monwyrt dazedly tried to shake some order into his head. The light was blinding, the noise was distracting, and that voice, that voice... he closed his inner lids and tried to focus his aching eyes on the fuzzy image before him.
Slowly, agonizingly slowly, maddeningly slowly, but nevertheless steadily, the figure resolved itself into - the assumed form of a Waeccelang! In an overwhelming instant, he understood.
"Igilvee!" he cried, lurching to his feet, and smashing his head against the low ceiling of the chamber. "Moc!" he shouted in pain. "I hate tungebunge caves!"
"Nice, er, talk for a Traeppedelfere! Hates caves! I should be insulted - wait a moment - yes, I am insulted! This cave you hate so is my, er, abode. Residence, rather."
"I'm sorry, Igilvee," Monwyrt apologized. "I didn't mean it. I hit my head."
Igilvee considered this a moment. "And striking your head results in contradicting your intentions with your words. Interesting. But it explains your backwardness, doesn't it?"
Monwyrt crawled away from the stream, out into a more open (and higher-ceilinged) part of Igilvee's "residence." It was a large room; long, with an arching roof, cut into the hard black stone. The stream ran along one wall in a cunningly chisled trough. The light, and the sound, that Monwyrt had noticed came from the mouth of the cave. It was a wide opening, apparently facing the sun at that time: and covered by a solid thundering sheet of falling water. The sunlight forced its way through the water with mickle success, but was sufficiently bright to bring tears to Monwyrt's undilated eyes. Against the dry wall were the remnants of a crude bed of mosses and fronds, a spluttering, smoky campfire, and several varied and well-behaved creatures, intently watching Igilvee's every move. Monwyrt turned to the Waeccelang.
"You are Igilvee, aren't you? I mean, you have to be."
"Igilvee. Igilvee. Igilvee? Igil- Aha! I have it! Yes, of course; you have met the er, the, oh, blast it! the, you know - short, fat, ride those, those - oh, those big things with the thin, the thin..."
"Eatopygiastees."
"Yes! Yes! Thank you, the Eatopygiastees! that's it! Now, I was trying to think of the name for the things that ride the Eatopygiastees, you know - they are short, and - "
"The Eatopygiastees ride their iscelervees," Monwyrt interrupted. "Um, I met the Eatopygiastees. They thought I was you. They called me Igilvee the whole time I was with them. I didn't know: I thought it was just some name they had made up for me, so I let them. I hope you don't mind."
"Don't mind what?"
"That they called me Igilvee. They called me by your name."
"Why would I mind that? I don't really have a name, you know - I must explain that to you some time."
"No!" Monwyrt shouted hastily. "I mean, some other time, perhaps. Where are we?" he asked.
"We are in my residence," answered Igilvee simply.
"Um, but where is your residence?"
"Why, here! of course," Igilvee said.
"Um, um, um," Monwyrt said impatiently, "but where is here, say, in relation to the mountains outside?"
"Would you like to go somewhere else?"
"Um! I mean, no! - "
"Did you hit your head again?"
"No! Look, let's try this. Point in the direction of the warm pool I just came from. Do you know where that is from here?"
"Of course! It is right up this tunnel - but that is not the easiest way to get there."
"Forget the pool. Point in the direction of the great water." Monwyrt was becoming frustrated.
"Great water, great water, great wa - oh! by 'great water' you mean that thing you call the 'Luhvluhv?'"
"No! No - wait, all right! the river, um, that's fine! The river: can you point in the direction of the river?"
"Yes."
"Will you do it for me?"
"Oh! I understand! You want to know where the river is!"
"Um, please tell me!"
"I'd be happy to!" Igilvee turned to face the opening of the cave, and pointed out. "There."
Monwyrt took a couple of excited steps in that direction, but realizing he couldn't see out, stopped and asked, "Do you mean the river lays in that direction?"
"No. I mean that is the river."
"What is?"
"That! That water, there!" Igilvee pointed insistantly. "I didn't expect you to remember, Monwyrt, but I didn't think you were stupid!"
"Remember what?" Monwyrt asked uneasily.
"Do I have to hit you over the head with it, then?" Igilvee grumbled. "Well now, well now, well now, so be it!" The Waeccelang hobbled slowly over near the rough bed and lightly picked up a rather heavy-looking pole, and carried it back toward Monwyrt, who flinched and flung up his sore arms in defense. "You are stupid, aren't you?" Igilvee asked in disgust. "Don't you recognize this?" the Orsnumquammee waved the pole in Monwyrt's face.
Monwyrt looked at it. It was part of a longer pole, which had been broken off... "My pairsh!" he muttered, astonished. "Why, how did you find that? I broke that when I..." his voice trailed off, and he slowly turned his head to look toward the mouth of the cave, toward the great pouring sheets of water.
"Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!" Igilvee seemed about to dance with glee. "Yes, Monwyrt - the falls! You came crashing into my cave here - wetting my floor rather rudely, I might add - clutching this, er, what? Oh! I have it - pairsh in your, uh, er, your fingers, like it was The Rule itself and you had just discovered it. You seemed to be, uh, you seemed to be, you were, drat it! you were bad, no, pain, something like that, Oh! I have it! You were hurt! You were hurt, and it took me what you might consider some time to, er, right you again. Do you remember? no, of course you don't - what am I saying?"
Monwyrt was stunned. "I was here?"
"Oh, yes, I should say so, right here - er, right there, rather." Igilvee pointed to the bed.
"And you live here, beneath a lake, behind the falls?"
"Yes! I'm so sorry I called you stupid! Well, no; because at the time, you see, I fully believed it to be justified; but now, it turns out - "
"And right below us here begins the mersc?"
"Mersc?"
"Fens."
"Fens?"
"Bogs?"
"Bogs?"
Igilvee!"
"Igil - oh, right! Right! Yes! and out that way," Igilvee waved an arm, "is the er, the Eatopygiastee dwelling-place, and over that way," he pointed in the opposite direction, "the warm pool you found today. So - what is it? glad, er, happy - so happy to meet you again, Monwyrt! So happy to have met you at all! You're the first, you know!"
"Um, um, first," Monwyrt mumbled distractedly. "How did you get me down the falls?"
"How did I - What does that matter? The important thing is that you are here! You don't know it, Monwyrt, but we had many long and interesting, er, communications while you were here before. I have anticipated with something approaching, uh, anticipation your return."
"You knew I was coming?" Monwyrt asked meekly.
"You forget to whom you speak! Did I know?! Did I know?! Besides, I rather planted the, er, idea in you, you know. You were here for many, uh, many, uh, many - days! that's it, many days. I did not allow you to, er, awaken, but we communicated quite a lot notwithstanding your unconsciousness."
"You gave me dreams! didn't you?! You gave me that batohram! I was here in your cave all through the rains, wasn't I? the whole rainy season!" Monwyrt was excited, and frightened. He hurt all over, and his head throbbed. He walked stiffly toward the bed. Suddenly it seemed very inviting. "Hey!" he called back to Igilvee, pointing to an opening he now saw which had been hidden from his view before, "there's another corridor here!"
Igilvee was not paying any attention. "Ah!" he ejaculated. "There it is! I thought so!" He walked back toward the stream, and drew out a dripping parcel.
"My pack!" Monwyrt identified it. "How about that!"
"How? What do you mean?" Igilvee puzzled. "I assumed that you would have some food in your pack. You do, don't you? I'm glad you brought it along." He brought the pack, broken thongs and all, across the floor to Monwyrt, who had sat down beside the smoldering fire. "How did you know I would be back?" Monwyrt asked. "I mean, I nearly drowned in the great water. I could have been killed by the Eatopygiastees. I thought I would starve to death in the fens. How did you know?"
"Oh, well, you know, non-dimensional existence has its advantages, Monwyrt. Let's just say, I knew."
"Then you knew I would kill all those poor Eatopygiastees, too!" accused Monwyrt. "Why didn't you stop me? Why didn't you tell me I could put them to sleep, instead of to death? Why did they have to die?"
Igilvee sighed. "Why does anything have to die? I'll tell you why, Monwyrt. It is because immortality is too big a responsibility for immature beings to, uh, to grasp, no, to control. It promises power, but delivers only helplessness. It leaves one with an unrequited longing for mortality. As for your Eatopygiastees, what does it matter? They would have died sometime; this way, they died to gain what their race will consider a great boon. It made their lives worth a great deal; their names will be glorified!"
"But what good is such glory to you when you are dead?" Monwyrt cried passionately. "Think of the time they might have had, time that they lost because of my ignorance."
"Time - faugh! What is that? Their lives were worth nothing to them while they were alive! You saw how they lived: wretched, carping solitary tubs of vitriol stamping in their mean little dirt-piles of gardens. Now their deaths are celebrated! Their deaths gave meaning and significance to lives that would have been utterly devoid of both regardless of how long they lived or how high they were promoted. I have observed the Eatopygiastees for, to you, a long, long time. I have long known that you would arise one day, of course, but I didn't foresee you being a - what is it? - Traeppedelfere. Just imagine it! Anyway, I believed strongly that one of them would be sitting here someday instead of you. But they were disappointing. They went the wrong way. The wrong way altogether: True Order, Logic, keeping records of their petty little decrees and decisions; stifling and regimenting themselves; reducing life to its simplest, most mind-numbing elements. Faugh! When one of their ignoramus, er, Usunees thought he encountered me in the street - I was there, but he was looking in the wrong direction! - and greedily asked me to help him gain what he thought would be an advantage over his stupid rivals, I was only too happy to oblige. Twits! I lost patience with them long ago."
"So they died because you 'lost patience?'"
"They died because you told them to die."
"But I didn't really want them to die!"
"What? Had you hit your head on something? Why did you tell them to die, then?"
"They were going to kill me!"
"Aha! You see? Your life was more valuable than all of their lives."
"I can't accept that! I wish I had known I could have willed them to sleep, or to dance, or something!"
"Then you are mourning your own ignorance more than the deaths you caused."
"My ignorance caused those deaths!"
"And now your ignorance itself is dead! Wake up, Monwyrt! Don't you understand yet? You have learned, you have grieved, you have grown. Every thing you do adds to you, makes you greater. You are alive, Monwyrt! The Eatopygiastees could not say that before you came. Perhaps they will be able to say it now."
"Then, Binatree was right!" Monwyrt mused.
"Er - Binatree?"
"An Eatopygiastee," he explained. "He spoke of freedom, of responsibility, of deception and trust. He did not regret the deaths - his own folk! I taught him thought-masking." Igilvee seemed to chuckle inwardly. "He! Him! Oh yes, I remember, I remember. Well now, well now, well now, it seems that at least one Eatopygiastee is alive, at last. They will bear some scrutiny now, again, perhaps."
"But how can my single life outweigh all those others?" Monwyrt cried. "How can I live with the memory?"
"Eh? Memory?" Igilvee started. "Ah, but it would be a simple matter to block that, er, memory from your mind forever."
"You could do that?" Monwyrt asked hopefully.
"Of course. Easily. Nothing to it." Igilvee said. "But answer me this: do you want to die?"
Monwyrt became alarmed. "What do you mean?" he cried. "Do I have to die to erase that memory?"
"Just answer my, uh, my question."
"No!" Monwyrt shouted. "No, I don't want to die! Of course not!"
"Well now, you might as well die, you know, as begin blocking things from your memory! You would be regressing, Monwyrt; shrinking, dying. You paid dearly to earn that memory, it is valuable, it has weight. You cannot cast it away, and live, and really be alive. And to erase that memory would mean that you would surely someday repeat the experience, you know."
Monwyrt was horrified at this suggestion. "Repeat it? No, I don't want that, at any cost!"
"Then you will live, and your life is indeed worth the price! To yourself, that is, Monwyrt, worth it to yourself: you do what you have to do, and you will be alive, and you need not regret a thing."
Monwyrt thought about this. It sounded incredibly selfish. It sounded like he could justify any act regardless of its consequences by the expedient excuse of "growing" or "learning."
"No!" scolded Igilvee, reading his thoughts. "No, not any act. But I know you pretty well, Monwyrt. You have a conscience. You have an appreciation of justice, of sacrifice, of values. You will not wantonly destroy without regard to 'consequences.' You have already discovered, I see, that it is not necessarily wrong to kill."
"What?!" Monwyrt cried, disturbed.
"Your, er, that thing, there," Igilvee indicated Monwyrt's pack. "It's full of, uh, meat, isn't it?"
"Oh," Monwyrt relaxed. "Um. I, well, I hunted for food, you see."
"Perfectly understandable! You are alive, Monwyrt, and mortality is a rope with two ends, is it not?"
Monwyrt fell silent, thinking this over. It suddenly occurred to him that he didn't know what to do. His last several hand-days had been all plotted out for him ahead of time, it seemed: he had not once had to sit down and think about what he should do next. He glanced uneasily at Igilvee. Had the Waeccelang controled him so completely? He decided he didn't want to know.
"Do you know what you want to do, Monwyrt?" Igilvee asked gently.
"I - no, no, I don't," Monwyrt began. "I love to run in the forest, in the mountains. I hadn't realized on the plain, or in the fens, how much I missed the forest. When I escaped from the call of the great water, I guess I rather turned myself loose in the mountains. I can hardly remember what I saw there, now - they are a kind of familiar blur in my mind - and I don't like that thought. The mountains, the forests, hold a wonderful kind of feeling for me, like I am part of them, somehow; like I should be there. It is comfortable, easy. But now, it seems my time in them was not well spent, somehow. It is gone, and the feeling is gone, and I have nothing to show, not even a memory. I always thought I would never tire of running in the forests, and I suppose I never will, but somehow it seems that I should do more, some way. Do you understand?"
"Oh, absolutely! Completely! And what would that something 'more' be, do you suppose?"
"I don't know," Monwyrt said quietly. Igilvee almost smiled.
"I do! I know! I read your, uh, er, your - oh, what is it? ideas? no, your - oh, blast it! you know; when you, uh, when you - drat! you lay yourself down, you know, and close your - what are they? you close your, your - "
"Eyes?" Monwyrt prompted.
"Eyes! Eyes! Yes! you close your eyes, and you, er, you know, you close your eyes and you - "
"Think?"
"Think! Think? no, no, not think; you close - "
"Sleep?"
"Yes! That's it! I'm almost there, now; bear with me. Sleep! Yes, you sleep and you get these, these - oh, you know - what is it? in your mind, when you sleep, Oh! you said the word yourself, just a little while ago, and I can't come up with it! You sleep, and in your head - "
"Dream?" Monwyrt guessed at last.
"Aha! Thank you! Dream, yes, dreams: I read your dreams while you were here, many dreams, and they told me a great deal! I know what you really want, and I tell you it is a capital thought. Excellent! in fact, just right!" Igilvee fairly beamed.
Monwyrt looked at him with profound skepticism. "And what is it, if you will be so kind, that I really want to do?" he asked drily.
Outside, beyond the waterfall, the sun sank through a thin haze obscuring the horizon. The water exploded into orange-red shards of glittering sparks, painting the black walls and floor of the cave an intense and queer hue of yellowish-green. Everything in the cave, including himself, glowed with the weird refracted light: everything except Igilvee. Monwyrt stared. The Waeccelang stood there, serene, appearing exactly the same as ever.
Monwyrt stayed in Igilvee's cave for a hand-day. He found himself terribly beat-up by his passage through the mountain tunnel. His second day with the Waeccelang was particularly painful, much to Igilvee's seemingly perverse delight.
"Mortality, sweet mortality!" the Waeccelang kept repeating, to Monwyrt's extreme irritation. After two days of rest, Igilvee showed Monwyrt around the labyrinth of natural halls and corridors adjoining the cave. Igilvee claimed that one could travel all the way through the mountains without coming above ground.
But the Waeccelang was particularly animated in describing the double waterfall at the door - "the only one of its kind!" The great river, the Luhvluhv, poured over the top, dwarfing the tiny stream entering the flow from underground, but there it was: two separate rivers pouring over the same cliff together.
Monwyrt marveled at his luck again, to think that he had quite accidentally fallen over the great falls and swung himself through the torrent at the precise gate to the hidden cave. The coincidence seemed quite unremarkable to the Waeccelang, though.
"Life!" was all Igilvee would say by way of explanation.
Monwyrt still felt lucky.
At last the ache of Monwyrt's bruises eased, and he was ready to leave. "You were right, of course, about what I really want to do," Monwyrt said at their parting. "Thank you."
"Good-bye, Monwyrt," Igilvee said warmly. "You are the first. You will not be the last. Perhaps your kind is destined to avert the "mistakes we made."
"Perhaps? Don't you know?"
"I can not say."
"But you know, um?"
"I can not say."
Monwyrt snorted, and gave up. "Anyway, you are wrong about one thing," he said, "I am not the first. There was another. He is dead now."
"Then he was not ready," Igilvee declared darkly. "You are the first, Monwyrt. Follow your desires. They are pure, Monwyrt - you can have no conception of how I envy you now! You are what I would be. Go now. Go and live!"
Monwyrt looked up the long corridor, hitched up his pack, touched the hilt of his knife on his leg, and lit his makeshift lamp. "Thank you, Waeccelang." He hesitated a short moment. "Good-bye."
"Good-bye, cild."
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