1. A BOWL FULL OF GODS
MOST PEOPLE BELIEVED THAT THEY WOULD EVENTUALLY go to heaven, even the ones whom
everybody else knew would never make it. Very few, however, believed they could
get there without dying.
The mountain had always fascinated him, but he had never really understood the
awe and fear it inspired in almost everyone else. The Mountain of the Gods, the
Cheyenne called it, and to be sure it was peculiar.
Enormous, it had a conical, volcanic shape although it was not, nor had it ever
been, a volcano. It rose up in the center of lesser, ordinary mountains,
straight into the sky itself. None had ever seen its peak and lived to tell
about it, for even on the clearest of days a dense ring of clouds shrouded its
top from view. The clouds moved around the peak, usually clockwise, and
sometimes seemed to swirl and boil as they did so, but the great cloud ring
never dissipated, never thinned, and never revealed what was beyond the
five-and-a-half-kilometer mark.
Certainly there was good reason for the people of the region to both fear and
worship the mountain. It looked different, it behaved differently, and it had
been there for as long as any of the People could remember. Why he felt more
fascination than fear, and had felt that way even as a child, he couldn’t say,
although he had always been somewhat different from others.
He was a Human Being—what the subhumans of other nations called a Cheyenne—and
he was a hunter, a warrior, and an adult of some rank. He shared his people’s
mystic sense of being one with nature, of the tangible and spiritual
interrelationships between human and nature, and accepted most of what he had
been taught. He did not, however, believe that gods lived inside mountains.
Both his chief and his medicine man knew of his obsession with the mountain, but
they were unable to sway him. They argued that none who had ever dared to climb
the sacred mountain had returned and that the spirits guarding its slopes were
of the most powerful sort. He believed in spirits and in sacred ground, but he
could not believe that the mountain was a part of this. The mythology alone was
too new, by the way his people measured time, and quite unconvincing. He also
knew that there were things of Heaven and things of Nature and things of men,
and the mountain had always seemed to him to be the last of these, the legends
and stories deliberately spread to prevent any questioning of the mountain’s
existence. It was on the People’s land, but it was not a part of the People, nor
had it been there in ancient times, as had the other mountains.
What the others saw as supernatural, he saw as insult and, perhaps, as
sacrilege.
We hunt the buffalo and deer, and we manage the land well for the Creator, the
medicine man noted. It is a good life we have here, a precious thing. The
mountain is a part of things, that’s all.
It is not a part of things, the rebel argued. It is unnatural but not
supernatural. I know as well as you what it is like for those in the Council.
There they live not by nature and the skill of their inner and outer selves but
rather by machines and artifices. Everyone knows this, for they must return to
us for a season every two years. This mountain is neither of god nor nature, but
of men. You are a wise man. Surely in your heart you know this.
I know many things, the medicine man replied. I am not saying that you are
not correct in this, but correct does not necessarily mean that you are right.
You know, too, that the Creator once punished us for our pride and subjugated us
not even to the subhumans but to demons with white faces who slaughtered the
buffalo, slaughtered the People, and contained the rest on worthless land,
condemning us to a living hell in which our very way of life was made
impossible. Most of the white demons have been carried off now to the stars, and
the rest given their own domain far across the Eastern Sea, but they left many
works of evil here. You can still stand on peaks and see where they had blasted
great roads through the mountains, and you can still go to many places and find
the remains of their once-great cities.
Then you are saying that it is true. The words were spoken with a curious sort
of smile. That the stories and legends of the mountain were created to keep
people away. It is in fact something created by creatures of Earth, not heaven.
Creatures of Earth and hell, the medicine man spat. It is a foul place. It is
perhaps the doorway to hell itself. Left alone, it does not bother us, and we do
not disturb it. What if you challenge it, and it devours you as it devoured the
few others who have gone to it? What is gained? And if you survive, and if you
let loose the hordes of evil demons that it might imprison, then you might well
bring down the wrath of the Creator upon all of us once more. Then much is
lost.
All that you say might be true, yet I will challenge it. I will challenge it
because it is there and because I choose knowledge over cowering like some child
in a summer storm, its ignorance reinforcing its fear. It is the duty of Human
Beings to conquer fear, not be ruled by it, or we become less than the
subhumans. I respect the mountain, but I do not fear it, and there is but one
way to show that to the mountain and to the Creator who raised us above all
others in spirit. I do not accept your argument. If I do not go, then I show
fear and lose my own worth. If I go and die, then I die in honor, in an act of
courage. If I do not go because it might loose some demons upon the People, then
the People as a whole will be subject to fear. If we allow ourselves to be ruled
by fear in anything, then we are not the true Human Beings, the highest of
creation, but are instead subject to something else—fear of the unknown. And if
we are subjected to that, then we are subjugated and deserve nothing less, for
if fear can rule us in this, it can rule us in other things as well.
The medicine man sighed. I always knew I should have nominated you for Council
training. You have the kind of mind for it. It is too late for that now, I fear,
and too late for you. Go. Climb the mountain. Die with your honor and courage
proven. I shall lead the weeping and lamentations for you and for myself, for
erring in this way and having such a fine mind come to such a purposeless end. I
will argue no more fine points of logic with you. There is a very thin line
between stubbornness and stupidity, and I cannot shift someone back who has
crossed that line. Go.
The climb was dangerous but not difficult, which was all to the best because his
people had little in the way of metals and metalworking, and he had to make do
with rope and balance and sure footing. He had been afraid that he would be
ill-prepared, but the slope was rough and craggy, and with patience and by trial
and error he found a sort of path upward.
He had dressed warmly, with fur-lined clothes made to stand the toughest test
and a hood and face mask to help keep out the terrible cold even at this time of
year. An experienced mountain man, he also knew that the air would grow thinner
as he made his ascent and that he would have to take the climb very slowly to
give himself a chance to become acclimated to the altitude. He could carry only
so much water, but after a while snow would do. It would have to, for his
salt-packed rations caused great thirst and dehydration.
As he grew closer to the great ring of clouds, he began to wonder if in fact any
of the others like him had ever even gotten this far. There were snow slides and
hidden crevasses here, and the problems of weather, acclimation, and provisions
would stop anyone not totally prepared for them and fully experienced in
high-altitude work. The climb was not really difficult, but its relative ease
would fill a novice with confidence and cause him to ignore the many other
threats.
So far it had been like any other mountain that could be climbed without piton
or grappling hook, only taller. It looked neither as regular nor as strange when
one was on it as it did from afar, and he began to wonder if indeed imagination
might have played cruel tricks on the People.