Sickness, the serpent, is coming to bite you, Death, the old dark man, is coming to carry you off, Rest uneasy, you stinking carrion, on your gold beds.
Near the end of the Tunnel, the passage was less finished, and more treacherous. There were narrow bridges over black nothingness, where the wagons were partly unloaded to lighten them, and men and horses walked singly. And there were places where the roof dropped low enough to scrape the canvas wagon tops. But soon the air picked up the curious sweetness of above-earth air, and sharp fresh breezes blew down into our faces.
The tenth day we broke free of the tunnel-womb, and came out onto the rocky plateau that stretches for miles above the great expanse of river they call the Water.
It was late afternoon, the time when spirits usually begin to flag, but they rose high today when we reached freedom. Children and dogs ran round and round in frenzied games; there was a great sighing and relaxing, and looking up at the sky.
It seemed a curious thing, for we had found the Tunnel In the snow drifts, but now, on much lower ground, there was only the bare rock. Behind, the mountains towered, white to their middles, but here, a little warmer and beneath the snow line, we had only the fierce wild winds of the south to trouble us. They were dry and harsh, like the land they came from. We could catch a glimpse of it, that land, faintly, through a haze of distance-a dim smoky outline of flatnesses, all one desert emptiness it seemed from the plateau. Yet there must be life, or why had we come?
The river was another matter. It was many, many miles across, almost like a small tideless sea, a brilliant blue that
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would have nothing to do with the dull sky. There was apparently some deposit in the clay at the bottom that turned it this color, yet it seemed shocking in its intensity-a wide aquamarine ribbon, running from west to east as far as the eye could see, and onward almost to the horizon-a painted slash across the featureless gray-brown landscape.
Three or four streams forked down from the rocks, turning into falls to jump the gaps-these glass-clear and quite safe to drink from, as the river was not. A mile or so from the plateau a camp was made for the night at one of the many glittering pools these streams formed on their glittering progress to the Water.
Like dogs with the scent of the quarry in their nostrils, they were up early, and away again at dawn, winding down the track to the river. We got to it by midday, and uneasy silence fell on the wagon people.
There was the barren shore, where nothing seemed to grow except little clumps of a black sticky grass. Rocks, skinned and bruised by the rasping winds, stood up like thin deformed giant women in the attitudes of their bitterness and insanity. The air, sucking through holes in these rocks, made noises like girls crying or animals shrieking in pain. Before us, the blue beautiful poison of the Water, now the only thing we could see ahead of us to the horizon. It seemed a lost land, no place for us to be waiting in, for this is what we had to do. Today, or tomorrow, the boats would come from that seemingly empty other side, and take us and our wares across. Geret had said there were settlements and steadings on the other bank, and, farther south, the first of the great cities. But he was vague. None of them seemed to have accumulated much information about this place, as if it had hypnotized them, or drugged them, or as if they simply did not want to recall.
The wait went on, and a camp was made. The fires crackled redly in the gathering dusk, and it was very quiet-no bird song or animal cry, only the frightful noises in the rocks, the slight sluggish movement of the river.
I lay in the wagon, unsleeping. The cat crouched in a corner, wide awake, muscles tensed, her coat slightly bristled. I smoothed her and kissed her cat eves shut and she slept, but twitched in her sleep uneasily, reminding me of Darak. Later Geret came, rather drunk, swinging in with little ceremony.
“Pardon me, Uasti,” he said, brash with the beer, “but it’s an ill place here. Most of us seek company for the nights by the water.”
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“So, Geret. Go and seek company.”
He sat down and offered me the leather beer-skin.
“No? Now, Uasti, we should be friends, you and I. I helped you with the women when they wanted to kill you, and you helped me later to get what I wanted. I do very well now-better food, and a proper council where I have the say of things. There was a little girl I fancied, you know-her brothers were funny about it, but they’re friendly enough now, and so’s she.”
“Then why not go to her tonight, Geret?”
“Tiresome,” he said, “always the same one. A man likes variety.” He slipped one hot hand onto my shoulder. “Come, healer, you’re young and smooth under that robe-I know, I’ve seen you. And not a virgin, either, I remember. Oh, I was rough before, but I’ll behave myself now.”
“I do not want you,” I said. “If I had wanted you, I would have made you welcome long ago.”
He gave a little grunt of disbelief, and began to explore my body with his sweating hands. I thrust him off, and, surprised at my strength, he was still a moment.
“Have you forgotten so soon, Geret,” I whispered to him, looking in his eyes, “what I can do to you?”
He shrank back at once, groping for the leather bottle.
“Go,” I said. “There are plenty to help you. Out there.”
He lumbered from the wagon, and I saw him swaying through the dark, cursing.
I, too, left the wagon then, for it seemed full of the smell of him and the beer. The night was cold, yet oddly close. The wind gushed and quieted alternately.
I had begun to feel at last the rope that tied me to the wagons, and I yearned to go free. I wanted my aloneness, it was a longing in me.
I walked along the pebbled shore, and left the camp behind. Below, the water lay like ink, and I could smell its sweet and deadly smell. I recalled my race who had walked upon water, and wondered if I could cross, as they had crossed, to the far side which seemed, particularly now in the dark, to call me.
A cold white light struck suddenly over me, making me start and look back. The white moon had crested the mountains behind me. Its markings were oddly accentuated by the dusty air so that it resembled a bleached skull. The light lay in a sheet of silver glass across the water, and all at once it seemed a path, a safe way for me to cross by. My hands
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clenched, my body tensed with expectancy and the sense of Power. I stretched out one foot to begin my journey-
A shrill cry behind me, then other voices. I made out the call.
“Uasti! Healer! Healer!”
I turned, angry, sparks of fury burning under my skin, making every hair on me stand on end like the hair of the cat. A man came running along the bank, and I did not even walk toward him. As soon as he was near enough, he began to shout the story-his child, a baby of two or three years, had crawled away from its mother and drunk the blue water. The man tugged at my hand, and I knew I could save his child if only I hurried back with him, and I could not seem to do it.
“I am with the god here,” I said to him, “and you have interrupted us.”
He stammered, nonplussed and at a loss, and suddenly the glass light on the water seemed to crack, and I knew what he was asking, and turned and ran with him..
The child was screaming and kicking, the mother in a frenzy of terror. I turned her out. and made the child vomit copiously with one of Uasti’s medicines, then poured cup after cup of clean water down its throat, together with various herbs and powders. Pain had made it obedient, but once it was relieved it became fractions and sleppy. I thought I had saved its life, so soothed it and let it sleep. I was very weary by then, and went away to sleep myself. In the hour before dawn the man came and woke me-the child’s body had turned blue. I went with him but I could not even wake it, and soon it died.