The True Game by Sheri S. Tepper part two

And with that he shouldered his nutsaw and walked away into the dark. I smiled at the notion of a hatnut and then stopped smiling as I thought how light it would be in comparison with a metal helm. Nutshells were said to be tough as iron.

I went first to the Minchery, the school for musicians and poets, run by a sensible group of merchants on the same lines as a School House is run, except that the students are pawns, not Gamesmen. Except for that, it was much the same in appearance. The young are very much the young, no matter where they are. Which was not quite true. Mertyn’s House had never been so melodious as this place sounded.

I had thought out my story well in advance. A certain song, I said, had won a prize at a Festival in the south. The prize was to be given to the songwriter. I hummed a bit of it, sang a few words, and was taken into a garden to be introduced to a frail, wispy girl whose eyes were misty with dreams and songs. I put the gold into her hand and told her the same tale, glad I had thought of it for it brought her great happiness.

“Did it come to you all at once?” I asked, careful not to seem too interested. “Or did you compose it over a long time?”

“Oh, truth to tell, Gamesman,” she piped, “I dreamed it. The tune was in my head when I woke one morning, and the words, too, though they took some working at to fit into the music. It is almost as though I dreamed them in another language.”

Well, there was nothing more to be got there, so I thanked her, complimented her skill, and went away to find some place where merchants and traders gathered. It was not difficult. Learner lies upon the main road between all the fabled lands of the north and south. I came soon enough to a pleasant-smelling place, went inside and sat me down beside a leather skinned man with smile marks around his eyes. He was not averse to conversation, and by luck he had been up the Wind’s Gate.

“Curiosity is what I did it for, Gamesman. Nothing up there to buy or sell, far as I knew, nothing to trade for, no people, no orchards, no mines. Curiosity, though, that’s a powerful mover.”

I told him I thought that was probably so.

“Well, so, I’d traveled along this road between Morninghill and the jungle cities for thirty years, boy and man. Saw these cliffs every time I came this way. Saw those old bone shapes up there. So, one time there wasn’t any hurry about the trip south, and when we came to the notch there, the one they call the Wind’s Gate, I said, well, fellows, we’ll just turn in here and go up this notch to see what’s there.”

He seemed to expect some congratulations for having made this decision, and I obliged him with another glass and a hearty spate of admiration for his presumption.

“Well, Gamesman, there’s a kind of road in there. No real trouble for the wagons save a few stones needing moving where they’d rolled down off that mountain. Little ones, mostly. We moved and we rolled and moved and rolled, and the ground began to go up. Now I’ll tell you, Gamesman, there at the end of that notch the ground goes up like a ramp. Like it had been a built road. You’d think it would all be scree and fallen stuff, loose and slidy, but it isn’t. It’s hard and sure underfoot, just as though somebody put it there and melted it down solid.

“We didn’t want to wear out the teams. We left them at the bottom and went on to the top, me and some of the boys. Right up where those bone shapes are, and aren’t they something? I’ll tell you: Unbelievable until you see them close and then more unbelievable yet. Wind carved, so they say, and that’s hard to countenance. Well, we looked around. There’s nothing there. Waste. Thorn bush and devil’s spear. Flat rock and the Wind’s Bones. That’s it. Then, not far off, we heard that krerking noise the krylobos make, and a roar like rock falling, and one of my old boys says, `Gnarlibar,’ just like that, `Gnarlibar.’ Well, we hadn’t seen one, but we’d heard about ‘em, and we weren’t about to stay up there and wait for a foursome to show up, so we turned ourselves around and came back down quick as you please.”