Eventually the pain went away. I had no strength, but could just pull myself to the opening and look out upon the white valley, the pale thunder colors of the mountains, smoking earnestly as caldrons, volcanoes perhaps, trapped by an age of ice. I began to examine the bone, for I had stopped wondering now about my future or the actualities of my trouble, and had commenced reflection in the form of those huge symbols of infinity, or the invisible symbols of the nadir.
By constant touching of the bone and meditating upon it, I came to know its history, an insignificant and ghastly one, and from this reverie passed into others that dealt with earth and sky, surcease and eternity, men and gods. I grew very calm, a calm I had never known before and which left me afterward, for truly, I do not believe a man could retain this serenity, this strange content, and dwell in the places of humankind. It seemed to me I had fathomed the innermost secrets of myself and of everything, and maybe indeed I had; it was the fee I paid to life and living that when I began again to live I must forget them. In the tales of many lands, the prophet goes forth into the wilderness, the waste of sand or snow, or aloft on the barren black mountain, and when he returns to the people his eyes are great and luminous, his face is altered; he tells them he has seen God. I will suppose that God, if He is anywhere, is to be found in men, the nugget of gold buried inside the mud. I will suppose, too, that the wilderness washes off for a moment, or forever, the mud and the clay. Perhaps, then, the returning prophet should not say, “I have seen God”; but rather, “I have seen myself.”
If I were to total up the time I spent in the cave, I think, all in all, it would be near enough fifty days, but I shall never be sure, as I will never be sure of the mysteries I learned there, and forgot.
The end of the rite was very ordinary.
I appeared to wake from a pleasant dreamless sleep. The sun was rising and the pillar of waterfall splintering on its east side and the bright drops spinning down to the pool. I felt neither hunger nor thirst, nor sick nor weak. In fact, I felt quite normal, strong and able, my brain lucid and my body ready for any action I might require of it. This was patently absurd, and I knew it to be absurd. The visionary mood had sloughed off, I was entirely a man again, and rea-
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soned like a man. Still, there seemed no harm in trying. I stood up, stretched, and my arteries responded with a singing healthy flow of circulation. I was not cold, and no part of me had suffered from lying invalid here, immobile in the ice. After a minute, so taken with it as I was, I ran out of the cave and across the valley and back.
I had never been more fit. I think I cavorted in the snow like a clown, till I remembered something and sobered up. I remembered the Old Race.
The Old Race did not eat. I could recall very easily Demizdor’s mutterings, the Sarvra Lforn with its jeweled fruits, the nonexistent latrine . . . yes, neither eat, nor dispose of the by-products of eating-two tyrannies of nature dispensed with. Recall, too, my shame in that place of theirs because I had not been free of such essentials. And now. Now I was one with them. Blood told. My mother’s blood, for she, the white phantom, was so palpably a descendant of that Lost People of winter hair and white metal eyes.
I returned slowly to the cave, sat down there, and opened my pack. I removed the counterfeit silver mask, which Lanko’s scum, in their terror, had left me, and I looked in its blind gaze a long while.
Probably it had all come from her, all my Powers, from her race, their heredity in me. Perhaps there was nothing in me of my father after all, beyond a physical resemblance, a few memories of his retained in the cells of my brain, a brief flaring of his ambition, which I had at the last foregone. Apart from that, my abilities seemed of her alone. Even that time upon the fortress-rock near Eshkorek, when I had thought his shade or his will was guiding me, when I had grasped an alien language as if it were my own, even then, maybe, it had simply been my legacy of Power passed down from her, breaking in me because it was the season for it, because I had a need of it.
It seemed the memory of my father Vazkor was leaving me.
Three days later, breathing deep of the cold air, and needing no other substance to sustain me, I was making north across the ridges of the caldron mountains. Five days later, striding down their backs, the weather mellowed somewhat, and no snow fell.
I came to a river, frozen save at its center, where there was a gap narrow enough for a strong man to leap. Seven days
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beyond the river, I came on a forest of pines and next of black oaks, green with ivy. From a high terrace, I saw a. loop of the sea below and the land curving off about it to west and north. I went that way and discovered a village down on the shore, before evening.
Blue seals were bathing about half a mile out in the sunset water, and men-they looked in the distance much as men do everywhere-sat mending nets by a great fire, and I could smell the frying fish, which no longer stirred my belly, and see the yellow lamps lighting.
I did not go there, having no necessity, also, I believe, out of the way of mixing gregariously.
I was journeying, because it must be, toward that habitation I had sensed to be Uastis’ own. I wanted questions answered, and maybe still I wanted her death. Yet love of life is a curious thing, and comes like wine fumes in the heart and head at certain seasons.
Gazing down at that village on the shore-the playing seals, the western flash of the low sun-I needed no more than simply to exist, in order that I should be thankful for my birth.
Part II
White Mountain
I
I continued northward, parallel to the sea on my right hand. The quality of the winter, and of the terrain, had changed. Inland, forests folded away into round-topped hills; I saw a distant town with walls and towers, and birds flying overhead. I saw pasturage, and even the stacked steps of vineyards, everything under the snow now, in stasis before spring should powder the earth with other colors. A couple of times I found myself on a road, and passed men there. Wagons with roofs of painted hide drawn by shaggy horses, a fellow in an open chariot, driving wildly, as if he had some fury to get rid of, cursing me from his way. The chariot had a noble clumsiness, big-wheeled and breast-high in front, and clanking with plaques of bronze. The man had a head of peppery blond hair, lopped at the nape of his neck. He looked for all the world to me like a Moi tribesman got up in Eshkorek city clothes, though the fashion was somewhat different, the voluminous cloak of scarlet wool looped and pleated about him, caught back over the right arm on a shoulder boss, to show the striped gray fur that lined it. A day or so after this encounter, a woman went by in a litter draped with white bearskin, and she herself muffled up in other white furs. She, too, was fair haired, though more darkly fair than a Moi. She made her bearers and the three outriders stop and one ride after me to take me back to her. She wanted to know who I was, where I was going, if she might help me in any way. It appeared that wherever I went I should find women much the same.
I said I was a stranger. She said she could see as much. The language we used reminded me, in an odd way, too, of the
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city tongue of Eshkorek, though it was, in its essentials, different. She told me she was the daughter of a lord across the next hill; the road had turned inland about a mile back toward a pink-towered mansion, no doubt his. She entreated me to break my journey there. When I courteously refused her, she laughed. Since I had not given my name, she began playfully to call me “Zervarn,” which in this tongue meant something like “Dark Acquaintance.” From that I gathered black hair to be uncommon.