I had come to Charpon’s vessel walking on the ocean. I went from Lanko’s galley in the same way. It had a certain ludicrous aptness. After all, I could not swim. It was wiser to walk than submerge myself in icy fluid in order to reassure a band of brigands, and keep my inflamed conscience peaceful.
Again, no wonder. No pride, no disdain. It was useful; I was glad I had the art of it. They screamed behind me. How often, in my wake, those cries as the magician passed.
It is, after all, a very small thing to be a lord of men, men and their lords being what they are.
I came ashore.
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That place. It might have been waiting for me. In moments of foolishness and delirium that followed, sometimes I supposed it had been. Philosophy had replaced human terror for me, for I must employ my brain in some fashion while I endured. Occasionally, I reckoned the winter ice-fields of the southwest lands were figments of my mind. Or of some vaster and more astonishing mind, that thought in continents, dreamed in worlds.
Certainly, I was better equipped than most to face the rigors of the glacial open, which would have killed the strongest man in a few days, or less. My body continued to meet the cold unflinchingly. My skin dried, but did not corrode or flake itself raw; my eyes stayed clear though the lids swelled; and after sunshine, for about an hour once the light went, a temporary snow-blindness would haunt my sight with white gauzes. Even ice burns vanished from my hands in moments. I was not comfortable, but I was not in pain or distress. It was an extraordinary magnitude of self-preservation, never before at my disposal. As a child learns intuitively to make sounds, to organize its limbs, to recognize symbols, so I had learned, just as intuitively and with no conscious effort, these abilities, and activated them spontaneously.
I had determined to walk northward, sunrise and set being my guides. I say “walk” and walk I mean. I did not spring into the air. To levitate-or fly, as Tuvek might have termed it in his tribal days-is as wearying at last as to rely on the natural means known as legs. I had even been able to scale the cliffs above the shore without recourse to sorcery.
All this was simple. I had my goal, I had my healing and self-protective flesh. I had my indifference to doubt.
I had no food.
Throughout my life, I had been able to make do with little. Here and there, due to circumstances, I had made do with very little indeed, going days without nourishment. This was now the case. It did not impair my strength to begin with; actually, I took small note of it. I was convinced I should shortly come on some sign of habitation, or, failing that, game of a wintry sort I could bring down, if I must, with a bolt of energy. I had also snow everywhere to melt in my mouth for drink.
Six days passed, then twelve. My last meal had been a bit of biscuit I had consumed on the ship. Oddly, I had felt no hunger since, appetite gradually stifled by the low rations before. Suddenly, on that twelfth day .in the cold lands, hunger
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returned to me like a howling ravenous dog. The pack on my shoulders changed to lead. My guts knotted with vipers, a black light freckled my eyes; like a savage out of some prehistoric nightmare, I tumbled on all fours and crammed the fiery clots of snow between my lips, swallowing and gulping and scratching at the frozen ground with my knife for more. This makeshift dinner did me no good. I presently vomited, and lay afterward facedown in the broken snow, till the dim flaring of a magenta cloud told me the sun was going undercover for the night, and I had best stir myself to do likewise.
The land had been rising some while, and it was hard to make out toward what, for most days there was ice mist or thin snowfall to obscure the view. Once or twice I had seen loomings that might be mountains, or only further banks of fog. Once I had traversed a dismal wood, most of its branches lopped by the weight of the snow, and reduced to a forest of gray pylons with the sun running above and speared systematically on each. When it grew dark, I took shelter in a diversity of rocky outcroppings, in caves or on platforms, mainly to avoid the wild beasts I had hoped to encounter by day. I had even made a fire (for show I believe, as I did not absolutely need it then), using my Sri tinderbox rather than Power, and scraps of dry growths found fossilizing within the rock crevices.
On the evening of my hunger, I pulled myself up and staggered over a rise and into a narrow valley. It was exceptionally clear weather, and I could make out the darkening terrain. It seemed I had been already ascending the flanks of a mountain for a time, and had not been cognizant of the fact.
The valley was high, surrounded by uplands and peaks. A group of these seemed ominously to smoke, as if some dank furnace were going in their chimneys. The sun went, and the valley and the mountains were suspended in a silver twilight.
I found a cave. By the opening, a slender pillar of fluted glass stretched from the overhang above to a basin of greenish mirror below: a frozen waterfall. Sometimes, on its east side, it would warm at sunrise, the ice there would crack, and for a couple of hours smashed shards and water would splash down onto the unreceptive pool.
The cave was shallow and dark. In one angle lay a white bone. This bone became important to me, since it signified earlier occupancy, a link with the races of men and beasts.
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I had seldom been alone for very long. Alone in my brain and my soul, yes, but who is not? But physically unaccompanied. Crowds, bystanders, women to lie on, men to fight, enemies to be outwitted. Here there was only silence. The sounds and shapes I heard and saw were products of the landscape. No bird flew, no wolf cried; when a shadow flicked like a wing on the mountainside, it was a cloud passing.
The first night, I scraped up dirt and woody growths to make a fire in the cave. I chipped off a piece of the static waterfall and sucked this tasteless burning confectionery. I had begun to feel the cold in a strange, dislocated way, and my hands trembled from hunger. I fell asleep, and dreamed, as in stories they say the hungry man does, of roasts and mounds of bread and the fancy concoctions of cities. In the dreams I gorged and stuffed myself, and was never filled. Near dawn I woke with a groan, shivering, and with the snakes redoubled in my vitals. It reminded me of the plague, and presently I lapsed off once more, and dreamed of that.
I came to about noon, too weak to move, except that shortly I had to crawl into a corner to relieve myself, and thereafter often. My bowels were loose as if I had been eating rotten fruit and my bladder scalded, and several times I threw up, though I was hollow as a scraped gourd.
The day smoked out into night.
I lay on my back, with my Sri cloak rolled under my head, staring out across the blackened ash of my fire at the huge gems of the stars, of which some were bluish and some faintly green or pink. My head was quite clear. I was not even afraid. I knew I would not die, though I had begun to wonder what would become of me. Maybe, by use of my Power, I could draw sustenance to me, an animal from its winter burrow, a man who would help me. Yet when I tried to concentrate my will, I was aware only of the blank emptiness of an untenanted world. Not a whisper of life. Eastward the coast ran. In front of me, northward, another inlet of the sea, but how far away, hundreds of miles, days of traveling. . . . My mind began to cloud as I thought of it, and the weakness flooded through me. My Power was at a low ebb, after all, smothered like a flame. My hands were wooden and white, frozen now. I should lose fingers if this kept up, and would they grow again?
I had sensed a test before me, a knowledge I must achieve. Was this, then, the test, the knowledge: starvation, the reduc-
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tion of my physical self to a puking, helpless frostbitten baby on the floor of a cave with a bone in it?