AYN

 

 

I WAS UP early again this morning, in keeping with my new regime. Bet you didn’t think I would stick to it. Just some passing whim, forgotten as soon as mentioned. Eh, Khollo?

[An unfair accusation. Elder Ayn had his faults but a lack of resolve wasn’t one of them. He had got us to where we were, after all. Done nearly all he had set out to do since leaving Stonehaven.]

What you must realise is that the imminence of death sharpens the will considerably. Everything has to be done that one said one was going to. Recalcitrance is not an option. So I watched the sunrise. My prepenultimate sunrise. I soaked up its beauty. Such an ordinary thing, dawn. An everyday thing, one might say. The refraction of solar rays through the atmosphere, to reduce it to its bare scientific bones. Tormented light. Yet it is beautiful nonetheless. What makes it so? What is the point of its beauty? Why do those colours – those lustrous purples and fuchsias and saffrons – fall on our eyes and bounce through our retinas to the brain and make us think, helplessly, inescapably, ‘Yes, that is loveliness’? And why will that rainbow in two days’ time make me think the same? ‘Yes, that is loveliness.’ Even though I know what the rainbow has followed and what it precedes. Even though it is just tormented light too. Why do such sights work on our hearts as well as our heads? What is the purpose behind that? Does an animal look at a sunrise or a rainbow and admire? No. So why do we, we human animals?

Those Extraordinaries we stayed with thought they had the answer.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. We need to go back, do we not, to the moment I recruited Gregory to our little band. That’s where we left off yesterday.

I have to say I was on something of a high in the days immediately following. I kept Gregory close to me, tended to him, nursed him. His burns healed quickly, of course, him being an indestructible, but with that large chunk of his hair missing, singed away, he looked somewhat odd. Off-kilter. It was an aesthetic kindness that I removed the rest of his hair with my shaving razor, but this depilation had a more practical purpose, too, in that I had a strong previsionary foreboding that it would serve us well to get rid of so distinguishing a characteristic.

As we walked west, away from Penresford, I stuck to Gregory like a shepherd to his flock, barely letting him out of my sight. Without that attention from me, he would have no impetus to move or do anything. He was like an infant, entirely reliant on adult guidance and supervision. He didn’t utter so much as one syllable to me or to anyone. He had been traumatised by more than just his injuries. He remained mute and uncommunicative, a silent suffering presence by my side, yet that didn’t diminish one jot my feelings of protectiveness towards him. In fact, it only made them more powerful and more rewarding. At its most banal: it’s nice to be needed. And Gregory needed me. Also he represented, as I believe I may have mentioned already, the second crucial component of my scheme, the other actual parent of my brainchild. The fact that I had known I was going to find him in no way detracted from the sense of triumph and euphoria I felt at actually finding him. All in all, I was a very happy chap.

It’s safe to say Yashu did not regard him in the same rosy light. Having taken an instant dislike to him, her attitude didn’t soften in any way over the next few days. Several times I caught her staring daggers at him, or else she affected a lack of interest in him which was too studied and self-conscious to be convincing. I daresay she was more than a little jealous, like an older sibling feeling usurped when a new baby arrives in the family. There was, however, nothing I could do about that. She would have to, would, come round to him in her own time.

We went west, as I said, deeper into Jarraine, into the remoter, more sparsely populated quarter of that country. We stayed in hovels, literally on the first night, on subsequent nights figuratively. Inns that were little better than hovels. The Hotel Hermit Crab seemed a long way away then! We traipsed from village to village, homes to hicks and hillbillies, and I made out that this was what I desired to do, that the region was worthy of exploration by virtue of the rugged splendour of its landscape, which was true to an extent, true enough at least not to offend the sensitivities of the untrained sooth-seers among us. The aftermath of Penresford hung over us, we were all still reeling from it, of that there’s no doubt. So perhaps that’s why Yashu didn’t question too closely my motives for going the way we were going. Certainly it seemed that anywhere where there was less civilisation – for we had seen what ostensibly civilised people were capable of doing to one another – was a good place to be.

In the event, while we were trying to put Penresford behind us, Penresford was busy trying to catch up. From one landlord we got wind of the fact that soldiers were combing the area. He had no idea why. I, on the other hand, did, and was glad that according to my map we were nearing the border between Jarraine and Otrea. And then we came to the inaptly named No Surprises Inn, where there were surprises in store – for some of us.

A torrential rainstorm gave us no choice but to avail ourselves of that hostelry, and the lady who was its host and proprietor, Zelzan Haak, turned out to be in the same Inclination class as myself, which made for some amusing conversational gamesmanship between the two of us as we first made each other’s acquaintance and then attempted to divine what role each of us would play in the other’s future. I knew almost straight away that we were going to be betrayed, not by the rumpled yet redoubtable Zelzan herself, but by her husband, Lon. She knew it too and was at pains to inform us how close we were to the border and safety, less than three miles. The dynamic between her and her husband was an interesting one – she Air, he, a plant-sensitive, Earth. Two Inclinations that could not have less in common, but somehow they had made it work. It was clear, though, which of them was the dominant partner. For all her skirts and domesticity, Zelzan wore the trousers in that household. And she was embarrassed, I think, by what her husband was about to do, which was why she did all she reasonably could to help us. It was an affront to her, both as an inn proprietor and as Air Inclined, that Lon was going to leave the inn that night after the rain stopped and hurry over to a neighbouring village and get word out that the reason those soldiers were searching the area, the person they were looking for, was right there under his very own roof.

There was, you see, a bounty on Gregory’s head. It was Gregory the soldiers were after. He stood accused of murder, and not just any common-or-garden murder but murder of the worst kind, fratricide. He was certainly guilty of the crime but there were extenuating, indeed exonerating circumstances. It wasn’t a wilful act but rather a desperately tragic error which took place in a moment of confusion and anger during Penresford’s final hours. The story leading up to that moment is long and involved. Gregory has revealed it to us in dribs and drabs. Not the most forthcoming of boys. But I’ve pieced it together. In a nutshell, he and two members of the family he was staying with in Penresford were attacked by incendiaries, or so Gregory thought. He, naturally, retaliated. The victim of his retaliation, hidden within a flame shell, turned out to be his own brother. An awful jigsaw of events which, had even just one piece not fallen into place with such remorseless neatness, would have had a very different and far happier outcome.

That night, then, Lon Haak sneaked out and, by means of a local retired telepath, nobly and selflessly submitted information to the Jarrainian authorities that was likely to lead to the apprehension of a fugitive from justice. I wonder if he ever actually received any money, given that his tip-off ultimately proved worthless. We shall never know. When he returned home, anyway, there was his wife waiting for him with, I imagine, a rather dusty expression on her face, arms crossed, the metaphorical rolling-pin in hand. Zelzan set up a racket loud enough to rouse the entire household. I don’t doubt that this was intentional. When I emerged from my room Yashu was already up and the whole sorry saga was laid out before us – Gregory’s crime and Lon’s betrayal, which he regarded as an act of civic-mindedness and probably was, although a financial reward is always an irresistible incentive to do right. We packed hurriedly and prepared to depart. There was a slight delay when Yashu appeared unwilling to leave her room. I sent you up, Khollo, to coax her out, and you were successful in that task. And the reason for her dilatory behaviour – what was it again?

[‘The obvious, Elder Ayn. She wasn’t happy to discover we’d been travelling with a murderer. She was worried that we would all be tarred with the same brush. Guilty by association. Understandable, really.’]

Yes, understandable. Still, you were able to convince her to remain with us. I knew you would, but some official recognition for your powers of silver-tongued persuasion is due, and hereby given.

While you were undertaking that vital mission, Zelzan and I had the job of convincing her husband not to wake the neighbours and get them to hold us forcibly till soldiers arrived, as he was threatening to do. This we achieved through a classic previsionary’s bluff. Zelzan informed her husband that he was not going to do as he said. She stated it as fact, giving it the authority of prediction. I backed her up. With the pair of us insisting that Lon had no chance of success, Lon was persuaded that he had no chance of success. He abandoned his plan and went off to sulk in a corner.

We departed the inn and went westward once more, through dark then dawn then daylight, along a road that was a mere scratch in the earth’s skin. Ever westward, with the Vail Mountains now revealed on the horizon, rising from their pine-furred foothills, beckoning. At my first sight of them I experienced a pang. How could I not? There they were – here they are – the end-stop of my life. Once entered, I would never be leaving. Oh, that’s an appalling sentence construction. Participle dangling all over the place like a flaccid cock. I should change it. No, forge ahead, forge ahead. In fact, wasn’t that the very phrase I kept using at the time? Forge ahead. To encourage us all to keep going, even after we’d crossed the border into Otrea. To encourage myself as much as anyone, since my feet felt draggingly heavy. The mountains – deep at heart I did not want them to come closer, not even by a single stride. I think that then, if at any time, I most wished that the trajectory of my life was not so precisely plotted out. No, rather that I was not aware of its being so. Wished for the blissful ignorance of the future which is the lot of everyone but previsionaries. Wished that the Vail Mountains were nothing other than a range of peaks still sufficiently distant that I could, if I wanted to, blot them from view by raising an arm. Just rocks and snow, and not the terminal point of all I am and have ever been.

Deep sigh there, Khollo. Transcribe it if you like. ‘Hahhhhh.’ Or write ‘Deep sigh’. Or don’t bother. Up to you.

Throughout that morning there was a sense of being pursued and yet we never saw hide nor hair of anyone behind us. We must have reached Otrea well before the soldiers even got to the No Surprises, and of course they could not legitimately follow us across the border, not without risk of precipitating a diplomatic incident. All the same, the illusion was there – cavalrymen bearing down on us at the gallop while we tromped on at a comparative snail’s pace. Authority in all its brass-and-leather pomp, racing to overtake us.

And then it was noon, and then noon was past, and at last we had a glimpse of journey’s end. It was a lofty, sheer-sided crag running north to south, an obstacle we would have had to make a lengthy detour to circumvent. But we weren’t going to circumvent it. There was, invitingly, a cleft almost directly before us. And who in their right mind can refuse to enter an inviting cleft!

I indicated to the three of you that we would find refuge therein, and led you, like mother duck and her three straggling ducklings, up to the cleft. Had this not been where the road, such as it was, terminated, nothing about the cleft would have suggested that any kind of worthwhile destination lay within. It was just a vertical divide slightly wider than one’s outstretched fingertips. Nor, inside, was it any more promising-looking. The cleft was the opening to a sheer-sided gorge, of the same width, which curved deep into the crag on a shallow downward incline. The floor of the gorge was rock, with outcrops of moss and the odd puddle of stagnant rainwater. Peering in, I must say I began to have doubts about the accuracy of my own prevision. I had to run through the fore-memory of traversing this narrow defile and emerging at the other end just to make sure I wasn’t mistaken. Then in I went.

After about fifty yards I realised that only Gregory was with me. Yashu and my faithful Khollo still loitered outside the cleft. I beckoned. ‘It’s perfectly safe,’ I said, my voice echoing, batting from rockface to rockface. You overcame your trepidation. We all four proceeded. The sides of the gorge became taller, shutting out more and more of the sky like the jaws of a vice clamping together. The ground underfoot, meanwhile, became slipperier. Down through that deepening, darkening declivity we trod. We crossed a tiny streamlet which stemmed from a trickle on the gorge’s wall and dispersed across the ground in a fanning, slimy green delta. The air got cold. Our footfalls reverberated susurrantly. You’ve since told me, Khollo, that you began to wonder if the gorge even had an outlet; if it wasn’t simply going to keep descending for ever, or perhaps narrow until it was no longer passable. No one could argue that it certainly gave that impression.

But an outlet it had, an end. After a mile and half, I estimate, of twists and turns, the gorge opened out onto a ravine which ran crosswise, broader but with sides no less sheer and precipitous. The pebbles of an ancient riverbed crackled as we trod over them. The ravine widened and hard earth replaced the pebbles. All around us small brown mammals scurried, nipping in and out of view – some kind of gopher or ground squirrel. We slogged on, and shortly came across evidence of human habitation. There, in that unlikely spot. First of all, a fruit and vegetable plot smack-dab in the middle of the ravine. Rows of carrots, potatoes and the like, bean plants twisting up tall cones of sticks, bushes bearing a purplish berry. A good half-acre of produce encircled by a tight-woven wicker fence to keep it from predation by vermin. Then, just past that, a washing-line strung between two poles, from which hung a range of clothing – items of both male and female wear, none of which could be described as being in the best condition and some of which were just a couple of steps above rags. And not far from the washing-line, the mouth to a large cave, situated at the apex of a shallow-shelving ramp of rocks and stones that could only have been put there by human hand. A patched, ragged flap of tarpaulin hung down, screening off half of the cavemouth and providing protection from the rain, shade from the sun, and perhaps some semblance of cosiness. The flap flexed gently in and out, wafted by the breeze that flowed along the ravine in airy emulation of the long-gone river.

The cave was impenetrably dark from a distance. From the foot of the ramp, however, it became possible to discern movement within. Figures, rising. Picking up long-handled implements of some sort. Slowly emerging to blink at us in the daylight.

There were six of them, four men and two women, and they were shaggy-haired and scrawny and clad in the same sort of clothes as we had seen drying on the washing-line, things that had seen a great deal of wear and no less tear. So tattered and shapeless was these people’s attire, and so emaciated were the people themselves, that gender differences were all but erased. Only beards definitively distinguished the men from the women. Hard living had otherwise de-sexed them all.

Inordinately large eyes stared at us from skeletal faces. Bony hands clutched battered-looking homespun hoes and adzes. The way these implements were being held brandished, they looked as if they could easily be put to an altogether less innocent purpose than tilling and weeding.

We held this pose for several moments, the two groups, us and them, sizing each other up across a ten-yard gap. I heard you making uncomfortable noises beside me, Khollo. Did you not believe me when I had told you we were going to find sanctuary in that place? Or were you in the grip of some more primal disquiet? I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the latter. You must have sensed an oddness about the people from the cave. Something in us always jangles in the presence of an Extraordinary, and there we were, confronted with not one but six of them.

What is the collective noun for a group of Extraordinaries? Maybe there isn’t one. A blankness of Extraordinaries? A vacuum? A dearth? I ask because in the normal run of events one seldom comes across more than one or two of these rare beasts at a time. To meet half a dozen in the same spot was more than usually disconcerting. One’s instinctive unease wasn’t just multiplied, it was multiplied exponentially. Or perhaps an alternative mathematical metaphor: as when the product of two negatives is a positive, so the product of several Extraordinaries together is also a kind of positive, a something arisen from an accumulation of nothings, a force of absence, an aura of massed lack. It’s an experience which, as I am amply proving, is hard to put into words. Unsettling, though, it definitely was for all of us.

Possibly we would have stood there till sunset, facing one another wordlessly, nobody ready to make the first move, but then a seventh Extraordinary came out from the cave. This man was no taller than any of the others, no more well-fleshed, no healthier in appearance, no better dressed, but he nonetheless exuded importance, stature, charisma, all the hallmarks of leadership. Lively-eyed, with streaks of silver in the hair that flared from his temples, he strode straight past his colleagues and down the rocky ramp. As he reached us his flaky lips pulled back, revealing the too-long teeth of the malnourished. This beard-breaking grin was accompanied by an outstretched hand, proffered first to me, then to you, Yashu and Gregory, in that order.

‘Marius Querennion,’ the man said, for all the world as if introducing himself to fellow-partygoers at some smart social function. ‘Forgive the wary reception. Nothing meant by it. As a rule, not many strangers pass this way, and we’re always a bit shocked when they do. Please be assured that we’re a peaceable lot and mean you no harm. On the contrary. Are you hungry? We can offer you a meal. Nothing fancy but it’ll fill a hole.’

Thus we ended up sitting in the cave, being plied with various foodstuffs laid out on unglazed earthenware dishes. Leaves of some dark-green salady stuff, a bean-based paste, a loaf of potato-flour flatbread, and some meat as well, stringy and bitter stuff which Querennion told us came from those mammals we had seen earlier. He, too, did not know what the creature was called, but it proliferated in the ravine and was easily trapped. ‘Tame and gullible,’ he said, ‘and if not very tasty, then at least it adds some solidity to an otherwise vegetarian diet.’

I have to admit to feeling guilty at consuming the food of people who clearly had little of it to spare, but the meal was offered so freely and with such solicitude that it would have been churlish to refuse, if not downright impolite. I saw scant such concern among my three co-travellers, who happily stuffed their faces.

[As I remember it, Elder Ayn set the pace when it came to eating and the rest of us struggled to match him. But it doesn’t matter.]

Then we were given water, and astonishingly cool and fresh and clean-tasting it was. Querennion said it came from a subterranean spring and gestured deeper into the cave.

The cave itself? The part we were in, what one might term its antechamber, was large, as spacious as any mansion vestibule and not dissimilar in size to Stonehaven’s Obsidian Hall. A dozen alcoves had been hewn out from the walls, each broad and deep enough for a man to stretch out in and sleep. A smaller niche next to the cavemouth made for a makeshift cooking range, with a deep groove cut lengthwise to channel the fire smoke outside. These, however, were the sole adaptations that had been made to the place. There were no other concessions to creature comfort. There was no furniture and no decoration, unless you count the tarpaulin door-hanging. No candles or lanterns. Living conditions of the plainest, most primitive type imaginable. It seemed scarcely conceivable that less than a day’s walk away lay the relative sophistication of the villages of south-western Jarraine. But then for those Extraordinaries what mattered was less geographical isolation, more ideological. They lived as they did by choice rather than necessity. The why was important rather than the where.

I should perhaps explain – but then it’s quite obvious, isn’t it? – what they were doing there in that empty, barely habitable place. They were one of those mystical sects which Extraordinaries, and it seems only Extraordinaries, are so fond of forming and joining. One hears about such sects all the time, but equally they seem like a rumour or a bad joke, just another way of stigmatising their kind. Like the name Extraordinary itself. I mean, if that isn’t irony, what is?

This lot, at any rate, dubbed themselves the Trustees of the Godhead, and they had, according to Querennion, peopled that cave since time immemorial. Over the centuries their numbers had waxed and waned, sometimes reaching as many as twenty or thirty, sometimes reduced to just one. They espoused, he said, a set of old, old beliefs which survived from one occupancy to the next by means of a scrupulously maintained oral tradition.

Querennion added that he wouldn’t bore us with further detail. We were Inclined, for one thing, so he would be wasting his breath, but more to the point, the worst thing a person could do, in his opinion, was try to shove his beliefs down others’ throats. What he would like to do, though, if we were agreeable, was show us the cave’s heart. Whatever one’s viewpoint, whatever one’s Inclination or lack of it, the grotto at the cave’s heart was a universally awe-inspiring sight. He had taken a liking to us, he said, which was why he was making this offer. We could always refuse, he wouldn’t mind.

I couldn’t see the harm in taking a look, and my fore-memory of the grotto justified this decision with a tingle of anticipation. Nods between you, me and Yashu confirmed that you would like to come too. Gregory, of course, remained eminently biddable. All I had to do was take him by the hand and he blithely tagged along.

At its further end the antechamber funnelled down to become a broad, rounded tunnel. It was a nostalgic moment for me to find myself once more in a corridor that burrowed through solid rock. Had it really been a month since I left Stonehaven? It seemed that a second lifetime had gone by, that I had done as much during the past four weeks as I had in all my four decades in Stonehaven’s smug, smothering embrace.

We proceeded single-file, Querennion at the head, and soon the light from the cavemouth, which glimmeringly outlined the tunnel’s smooth-ribbed walls, faded and we were immersed in darkness. Querennion advised us to place our feet carefully. We could, if we wanted a little extra security, brush a hand along the wall to guide ourselves, as the blind are wont to do.

We shuffled through a cool, whispering void where the only certainties were the floor underfoot, the clammy wall beneath one’s fingertips, the breaths and footfalls of one’s companions fore and aft. The tunnel appeared to tend downhill but it was hard to know for sure. Then – and it seemed we had been walking for an unchartably long period of time but it may not have been more than half an hour – I began to perceive Querennion in front of me again, albeit dimly, limned by a faint greenish glow ahead. His silhouette swayed against this light source which, as it grew closer, spilled along the tunnel walls to form a brightening halo around him. It was a green as of jade, milky and serene. My hand, lit by it, floated in the air like some glaucous sea-creature. From behind me I heard a hushed Air-Inclined oath...

[It was an eerie sight and no mistake, that green light. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. What was it? What was creating it?]

...and then I became aware of noise emanating from the same direction as the light, a relentless patter and spatter that echoed in such a way as to suggest vastness – a huge contained space resounding with watery activity.

This, sure enough, was the noise of the grotto. The tunnel opened out and there we were. We were in an underground chamber whose dimensions had no analogue in any manmade chamber I have seen. It reached up to a height of perhaps two dozen men standing on each other’s shoulders, perhaps more. Roughly cylindrical, its circumference must have measured, what, three hundred yards?

[‘At least.’]

Great globular stalactites hung from the ceiling and similarly globular stalagmites rose from the floor, lumpen and glistening, not unlike inner organs in appearance. These and the grotto’s walls were coated in some kind of phosphorescent substance – a lichen, Querennion said, which thrived in conditions of sunless damp. The level of illumination it provided seemed considerable but then that might just have been in contrast to the darkness we had passed through to get there. I doubt one could have read by it. It was akin to moonlight, flat and somehow uncertain. Abyssal viridian moonlight.

It was cold in there. Not cold enough to make one’s breath visible, but almost. And did I mention the water? I mentioned the noise, but what was causing the noise was scores of drips and dribbles of water, either falling from stalactite tip to stalagmite tip or else coming down from the roof of the grotto to splash-land on the floor in eroded depressions, some of which were frying-pan shallow, others bath deep. It was a perpetual indoor rain, and each chain of droplets, sparkling in the lichen’s luminosity, resembled a quivering emerald necklace. The effect was entrancing. If one stared, one began to feel that it wasn’t the water that was falling, it was oneself that was rising. And the roar... That multiplicity of trickles, amplified by echoes and confinement, set up a din as loud as any cataract or sea-shore breakers. And the grotto’s size, literally cavernous. All of it conspired to leave one dizzied and stunned.

Awe-inspiring, Querennion had said, and awe-inspiring the grotto was. Indeed, it made a chap feel very small and insignificant. Unlike the Worldstorm, which belittles with its sheer bullying brutality, here one was humbled by majesty, by wonder, a voluntary rather than enforced surrender to the might of a natural phenomenon. I felt that I could have stood on the grotto’s floor and stared up, enthralled, for ever. Equally, I felt out of place, as if I didn’t belong, as if I would lose all sense of myself if I stayed in the grotto too long – almost as if the grotto itself wished me to admire it but was warning me away at the same time. Too much majesty. Too much wonder.

When eventually, by mutual consent, we trooped back along the tunnel to the outer part of the cave, everything seemed thoroughly drab and ordinary. The brownness of the cave’s interior. The emptiness of the ravine. The quiet daylight. The bland blue sky. Querennion and the other Extraordinaries, as if knowing how we were feeling, left us alone for a while. We four of us sat in various places on the rock ramp outside the cavemouth and husbanded our thoughts.

Yashu was the first to speak.

‘We should stay here,’ she said.

And for the next week we did. I can’t say why exactly – what it was that made us all agree with Yashu’s suggestion. Speaking for myself, while I was none too enthused about the days of discomfort and deprivation ahead, the prospect seemed acceptable simply because the grotto was there. To be able to revisit it, or just be close to it, appealed. And as Yashu had been so compliant and undemanding up till then, I had no qualms about letting her make the running for once. It was the politic thing to do. You, Khollo?

[‘You announced you would like to stay, so the choice was made for me.’]

No other reason? No? Well, fair enough. Nice and pragmatic. And as for Gregory, probably much the same. Our catatonic young friend was content to do whatever the rest of us were doing.

Querennion readily consented to our request. It was as if he expected it after showing us the grotto. He said if we didn’t mind living as they, the Trustees, did...

And so a week of eremitic existence, or should that be subsistence? At first the want of life’s basic amenities was noticeable, indeed hard felt. Not just the meagre rations, the bare unaccommodating rock of the alcoves in which we slept (or tried to), the communal outdoor latrine with its stultifying stench and permanent buzzing cloud of flies. These were bad enough. But what one was more aware of, and what made a deeper impact, was the Extraordinaries’ absence of Inclination and how it impinged on their lives. To watch them, for instance, tending their produce patch – toiling hard to keep the soil irrigated and weed-free, exhausting themselves at labours which strongs would have despatched in half the time and with minimal effort. To see them at such pains to make their fruits and vegetables grow and then at even greater pains to store properly what they harvested – no plant-sensitives on hand to propagate and preserve. To note how each of them was struggling under the burden of at least one kind of ailment, be it a cold-sore, a sprain, a strained ligament, an infected scratch, toothache, even in one case an eye beginning to cloud over with a cataract – the unavailability of a recuperator evident in a myriad ways. To observe how long it took them to light a fire by rubbing two sticks together – a box of matches would have helped, an incendiary would have helped even more.

Yet the other side of the coin was that the Extraordinaries did cope. By dint of effort and application and an unyielding tenacity they wrestled with the drawbacks of their chosen lifestyle and just about emerged victorious. Being without Inclination brought with it a host of hardships, yet they had adapted. They gritted their teeth and battled on. They even, in a perhaps perverse fashion, enjoyed it. They were proving a point. No, Extraordinariness was not the encumbrance it appeared to be. Yes, one could dwell apart from the Inclined world and survive. Just.

And of course they had their faith, too, these Trustees of the Godhead. They had their beliefs to keep them steady and bolster them in their constant round of vicissitude and travail. Something grim and solemn and fitfully cheerful lit them from within. A purpose. A shared certainty.

From time to time Querennion and I would fall to discussing the sect’s creed and lifestyle. More often than not he would initiate the conversations, seeking me out when he had an idle moment and softening me up with some light chitchat before broaching weightier matters. I flatter myself that he saw in me an intellectual equal, but perhaps he also saw the very embodiment of modern empiricism. I was a challenge to his orthodoxy. A test.

The precise content of our discussions I’m afraid I can’t relate, not in perfect detail, because my enshriner was not on hand for any of them. They were private, one to one. I can, however, summarise them, and shall attempt to do so concisely for fear of trying my readers’ patience with arguments that have been rehearsed in many another publication by commentators far wiser and more insightful than myself.

At heart all religious sects like the Trustees of the Godhead believe the same thing. That there is a higher power above us. That the human realm is governed by a numinous supreme entity, a being who is limitlessly powerful and essentially unknowable, immortal, all-seeing, a god. And that this god guides and shapes our ends. This god takes a hand, sometimes overtly, sometimes covertly, in all that we do.

Now, some sects, although not the Trustees, identify the god as the Worldstorm itself. And a very cantankerous deity this is too, perpetually angered at the behaviour of men and inflicting suffering on us at every turn. In the eyes of the Worldstorm-god we are all wrongdoers, guilty of venality and aggression and excessive love of material possessions, and in order to placate its wrath, or try to, the sects live humble, simple lives. Some of them go so far as to scourge and scarify themselves ritually. A kind of propitiatory offering to offset a greater deficit. Trying to buy respite for the rest of us with their misery and pain. Clearly works, doesn’t it.

Sects such as these Querennion frowned on. He dismissed them as fanatics and said that their deification of the ’Storm was inappropriate In a weird masochistic way they were venerating it, and the ’Storm was not a thing to be venerated. The Trustees of the Godhead – and they weren’t alone in this – took the view that the ’Storm wasn’t a god itself but was the tool of a god. Yes, it was there to punish men, but not so much for what they were doing, rather for what they had done once, long ago.

And at this juncture one might object, as I did, and say that if these sects’ beliefs had any credibility, surely they would tally with one another. All these people would follow identical truths, or indeed one fundamental, unvarying truth. To which Querennion gave a very frosty retort, saying that some sects were muddle-headed and others were just plain wrong. He treated the objection the same way every time I raised it, with blank-eyed, blanket condemnation. Amusing, no? How the alternative viewpoints Querennion was least prepared to countenance were those that were closest to his own. Whereas the viewpoint of someone like me, antithetical to his, he hardly had a problem with.

Anyway, according to Querennion – and the Trustees’ oral tradition – once, long ago, all men were worshippers of a single god. All men, moreover, were Extraordinary, or, to use Querennion’s own wry euphemism, DisInclined. They lived contentedly under their god. They comported themselves in accordance with his wishes. There existed a state of mutual trust between them and him (the god is genderless but, where the neuter pronoun would be accurate, the masculine pronoun is used, both as shorthand and to reinforce a sense of personality). The entire universe was the god’s handiwork, men were part of it, they happily acknowledged this fact, and all was harmonious.

But the trust was abused. The god, having become convinced that men were reliable and capable of regulating their own destinies, elected to take a remoter role in the running of things. A lackadaisical attitude, one might think, but perhaps he was bored or planning on taking retirement. For a time, anyway, men proved his faith in them right, but gradually they began to drift. As the god’s influence was felt less and less, men began to succumb to their own worst tendencies. They squabbled. They stole. They fought. They cheated. They cozened. They warred. They despoiled. They plundered. They lived for self-gratification. They eschewed the noble and embraced the ignoble. And the god – somewhat belatedly, if you ask me – spotted what was going on and was, to put it mildly, peeved.

In his indignation the first thing the god did was conjure up the Worldstorm. This ’Storm was nothing like the present ’Storm. This ’Storm was significantly worse. Ten times the size, twenty times as ferocious. For an entire century it scoured the planet from end to end, scrubbing the earth’s surface clean as a scullery maid might scrub a filthy flagstone floor. When it was over and the ’Storm abated somewhat, just a few scattered, embattled pockets of humanity remained. The rest was desolation.

The god took pity on these survivors. Repentant, as we often are after we lose our temper, he decided to imbue them with gifts to make up for the havoc he had inflicted on them. These gifts were the Inclinations. However, he also decided to assign different types of Inclination to different types of people. He had perceived that men had a flaw in their makeup, an intrinsic urge to seek out division and dissent. If that was how they were, then why not simply accept it. Work with it rather than change it.

And so men became Inclined. A few, however, a precious few, the god elected to keep as they were. He intended that, in them, there would survive a memory of the world as it was before the Worldstorm. In them, too, his true essence would be preserved.

‘For the god resides in all of us,’ Querennion said. ‘He is the tree and we are his branches. He is the sap that animates everyone.’

‘What, everyone?’ I said. ‘Even me?’

‘Even you,’ said Querennion.

‘In which case,’ I said, ‘how come I’m not aware of it?’

‘Because the Inclined tend not to feel him. Inclination insulates them from him. Whereas the DisInclined feel him strongly. We’re more directly connected to him. It’s the great compensation for the way we are. To us, you see, Inclination is the burden, not the lack of Inclination.’

The Trustees’ duty was to manage without Inclination and be exemplars of what they considered a purer, truer form of existence. What their lives lacked in comfort was made up for by a sense of profound purpose. They were, in spite of all the disadvantages they lived under, happy. Or so Querennion insisted, and as I’ve said, there did appear to be something about them, some sort of underlying, I don’t know ... serenity?

How Querennion had come to join the Trustees’ ranks was a straightforward enough tale. The son of Air-Inclined parents, both telepaths, he had struggled throughout his teens and early twenties to come to terms with his failure to manifest, shouldering the jibes and taunts of his peers, repeatedly being cut dead in the street by erstwhile boyhood friends, watching his mother and father gradually lose their social standing and become ostracised on account of him. He could look forward to a future of nothing but more of the same. What were his career prospects? His marriage prospects? Few avenues were open to him. Eventually, close to despair, and to suicide, he had the good fortune to meet another Extraordinary, a vagrant passing through his hometown, who told him about the Trustees and the grotto of which they were custodians. This is how knowledge of the sect, and others like it, is always spread. Word of mouth. Whispers passing whenever two or more Extraordinaries are gathered together. Immediately, the young Querennion knew that with the Trustees was where he belonged. He departed for the ravine as soon as he could. That had been thirty years ago. He hadn’t regretted it once.

The grotto itself, he told me, wasn’t simply a natural marvel. One of the Trustees’ basic doctrinal tenets was that their god could be experienced there. Their god liked to make himself known from time to time. A sweeping landscape, a gorgeous sunrise or sunset, the star-flocked night sky, the plumage of a beautiful bird – these and other sights that stirred the heart, they were him. Visual reminders of his power and presence. But in certain locales, like the grotto, he revealed his magnificence the most clearly. Had I felt it, Querennion asked. Had I discerned it in the thunder and fall of that green-lit cavern? God? I didn’t say that I had. I couldn’t say that I had not. I merely told him I thought the grotto impressive, and he regarded me levelly and nodded and seemed to sense I had no idea of the true answer myself.

Once, during one of our conversations, I enquired of Querennion whether his beliefs were not closely allied to those of the Water Inclined, particularly of isolated Wet communities like Li*issua. His god’s bestowal of Inclination and the Wets’ Great Fissuring seemed to me to be only mildly divergent accounts of the same event. Did that not invalidate his sect’s assertion that Extraordinaries were special, in some sense ‘chosen’?

Again, a frosty response. A nerve touched. Querennion pointed out that the Water Inclined had no god.

‘Oh really?’ I said. ‘Yashu’s people have this legendary father-figure Oriñaho. A superior being. All the Water Inclination classes rolled into one. He strikes me as being remarkably analogous to your superior being.’

More huffing and puffing from Querennion. He said that, with Wets, the belief system they lived by was cultural, ingrained from birth. They were steeped in it and so it wasn’t a matter of choice with them, merely a matter of conformity. By contrast, with Extraordinaries it was an impulse, an urge, an instinct. It arose spontaneously and was not imposed from without. For himself, journeying to this ravine had been like answering a summons. As soon as he learned of the Trustees it was as though a bell had chimed deep in his heart. The other Trustees spoke of the same sensation, he said. Irresistible inner promptings had called them here, as hunger calls a man to seek food, and this was plainly proof that theirs was the authentic form of faith, because it was elective and inwardly inspired.

When pressed on the matter, Querennion allowed that to the casual observer certain similarities might seem to exist between the two traditions, Water-Inclined and Extraordinary, but he maintained that Wets adhered to an attenuated – I think he may have used the word ‘bastardised’ – version. The Trustees, through zealous conservation, had clung on to the real thing.

‘What’s your opinion, then,’ I asked, ‘of the rest of the world? Those, like me, who live in almost total ignorance of your god. Who carry on oblivious, harried from time to time by the Worldstorm, not knowing the ’Storm is a continuation of a punishment first meted out on our long-ago forefathers. What good, in fact, is a punishment if the punishees don’t know they’re being punished?’

The ’Storm, Querennion replied, would remain a blight on the world for as long as men insisted on behaving wickedly and selfishly and without respect for others.

That, I told him, surely meant for ever.

True, he said, but then again, people might begin to realise the error of their ways. They might begin to treat one another as equals and not be so obsessed with the differences between us.

In other words, said I, they might cease to look down their noses at Extraordinaries?

That, said Querennion with a concessionary smile, would be a step in the right direction. But more generally, men might start to listen again to the voice of god inside them. There was so much rationalism in the world, so much store put by science and commerce and Inclination, so much arrogance passing for enlightenment. The tyranny of empiricism. It was time for a little humility instead, and the willing submission to a higher power. Would that be so difficult? People, after all, spoke of providence and fate all the time. They were in thrall to superstitions, especially where the Worldstorm was concerned. They acknowledged these sorts of external forces running through their lives, even if they didn’t necessarily believe in them. It wasn’t such a huge step from that to acknowledging one superior force, was it? A single, overarching force that controlled and drove everything.

I suggested that if he hoped for such a result, such a thoroughgoing change in human thought, then why not advertise? Why not open up his grotto to all and sundry? Let people see there what he insisted was there, his god’s glory. That would help, wouldn’t it?

‘Turn this place into a tourist attraction?’ Querennion said, and he made a great humorous show of being aghast at the idea, possibly to hide how genuinely aghast he was. ‘Never in a million years. Think how that would cheapen it.’

‘Not necessarily,’ I said. ‘I reckon you could charge a pretty hefty entrance fee.’

He was miffed at me for a whole day after that, but forgave me in the end. I do think I may have gone a bit far, proposing, even in jest, that he prostitute his sect’s most sacred place. But then if a challenge was what he looking for from me, that was what he was going to get.

And speaking of that sacred place, I revisited the grotto twice during our stay, once with Querennion, once on my own. With Querennion, the purpose of the journey was to fetch water. We carried pitchers fashioned of the same stuff as the dishes the Trustees served their food on. They made all these crockery items themselves, fashioning them out of wetted earth from the ravine floor then leaving them out in the sun to bake hard. We each took a pair of empty pitchers to the grotto and set them out to catch falling water. We carried already-filled ones back, and I can tell you, that was quite an effort. Brimming with water, those pitchers were heavy and awkward to handle. It was a long trip.

Since that visit had a practical purpose, there wasn’t much opportunity to pause and sight-see. The second, solo visit I undertook at night when everyone else was fast asleep. I was having particular difficulty getting comfortable in my little alcove, so I got up and ventured off down the tunnel, feeling curiously as if I was doing something daring and illicit. No one had forbidden us to visit the grotto unescorted. All the same, an undeniable sense of trespass.

The grotto was as it was. The eternally plummeting emerald rain. The lumpen accretions of stalactite and stalagmite. The relentless deafening tumult of splash and echoed splash. I surveyed it all with a coolly rational eye. I knew that the water filtered down from above through strata of porous rock, most likely originating from a subterranean aquifer. I knew that dissolved minerals, incrementally deposited over the course of millennia, had formed the grotto’s giblet-like growths. I believed that the lichen was as Querennion described it. There are tiny plant-like organisms in the ocean that glow. This was the land-based equivalent. All readily explicable.

Where, then, did the feelings come from? The awe? The intimidation? Why was there clearly some sort of presence in that place? As though one kept glimpsing something through a veil. Movement at the periphery of one’s vision, elusive, undetectable when looked at directly. The outline of a shape too massive somehow for the five senses to fathom.

Perhaps it was just disorientation. The glow, the noise, befuddling the brain.

Perhaps.

It was on our final evening with the Trustees that Querennion and I had perhaps the most intriguing, and ultimately most profitable, of all our talks. By that stage I found I had become accustomed to the Trustees’ ways and no longer felt so conscious of their Extraordinariness. It was almost as if Extraordinariness was just another Inclination, different but not disturbingly so, not any more.

Briefly, Khollo, your impressions of Querennion?

[‘I thought he was pretty decent. You have to wonder what living like that for thirty years might do to a man’s mind, but... He seemed level-headed. His intentions good. He meant well.’]

Ah, that lethally condemning phrase. ‘He meant well.’

[‘No, honestly. It’s a compliment.’]

Did he strike you as straight-laced at all?

[‘A bit.’]

Sober? Dependable?

[‘Yes.’]

And he had that habit, didn’t he, of underlining certain remarks with a steady, penetrating stare. Either as if to make sure he had been understood correctly or else as if scanning for mockery.

[‘You had much more contact with him than I did, Elder Ayn.’]

You’re never going to call me Annonax, are you, Khollo? I’m forever to be Elder Ayn to you. Oh well. Yes, I did have much more contact with him. And that stare, to me, was the mark of someone tightly wound inside. For all his religious conviction, for all his outward calm, Querennion remained at heart bruised and embittered, still that teenager feeling aggrieved at the bad tiles life had dealt him. Being a Trustee was a balm to his sense of injustice but sometimes even that wasn’t enough.

He invited me to join him for a stroll that evening. We wandered along the ravine, while those small brown mobile snacks darted around us, gambolling near the entrances to their burrows as dusk’s gloaming fired the sky. About three miles from the cave we came to a rockfall. A section of the ravine’s western side had slumped away, creating a rugged, sloping apron which we scaled on all fours. At the top, we sat. We were in a horseshoe-shaped concavity some one hundred feet up with perhaps a further fifty feet of ravine wall still above us. It was like sitting in the rear seats of a theatre auditorium, the ravine itself the stage. The lowering sun shed orange rays onto the opposite wall, the (as it were) backcloth. All very secluded and scenic.

Then Querennion reached down beside him and began lifting rocks away, to reveal what appeared to be, and was, a bottle. The bottle was a quarter full of some amber liquor. He grasped it by the neck, uncorked it, took a glug, and passed it to me. A very decent spot of whisky it was, nice and ripe and malty, with a far from unpleasant afterburn.

‘Sometimes,’ Querennion said, accepting the bottle back off me, ‘I just have to get away and be on my own. No slight on my fellow-Trustees. Good people, all of them. But a man needs his solitude from time to time. Needs to be alone with his thoughts.’

‘Especially a man in charge,’ I said.

‘Especially a man in charge,’ he confirmed. ‘And sometimes,’ he went on, ‘I’ll take myself off not just for a couple of hours like this but for a number of days. I tell the others I’m going to seek vistas and contemplation. Fast for a while in the wilderness. Sharpen my mind up, away from distractions. Listen to god’s voice. And it’s true, I do do that. Or at any rate, I used to.’

‘Where did it come from?’ I asked, indicating the whisky.

‘Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?’ said Querennion. ‘But first, watch this.’ And he gestured towards the ‘stage’. And we watched, and as the sun sank further the light it cast on the ravine wall turned from orange to rose to blood-red, and every single crack and crevice in the wall’s surface was picked out in pristine relief, and here and there flecks of mica twinkled amid the deepening shadows, and then one larger shadow, the rim of the ravine wall we had our backs to, swept up like the tide to overwhelm colour with grey. All very lovely, and the loveliness by no means lessened by our continued intake of whisky.

Then, tongue loosened by the booze, Querennion began talking. What came out of him was a mishmash of certainties and doubts, hopes and fears, delivered in the slurred tones of one who did not drink much and so did not need to drink much to get drunk. I, harder-headed, mostly listened, interjecting the occasional ‘yes’ and ‘hmm’. The image Querennion projected of the stalwart, unswerving leader crumbled away and there, beneath, lay a man as confused and questing as any other. What it boiled down to was: on the one hand, he had a responsibility to the Trustees and to the faith that bound them all together. On the other hand, what if that faith was misplaced? What if they were victims of some grand delusion? What if the rest of the world was right and there was nothing to life apart from that which could be seen and heard and touched? No god at all, only the belief in a god?

When this disconsolate outpouring had trickled to a halt, I told Querennion that I could identify with him. I said that I didn’t think there was an Inclined person alive who hadn’t at one time or other pondered on the possibility of some sort of deeper meaning, some sort of structure and purpose behind the apparent randomness of life. It might be, as he had stated earlier, that Inclination insulated the majority of us from a keen appreciation of anything but the material and the mundane.

‘Superior beings,’ he mumbled, interrupting me. ‘To someone like me, you’re all superior beings. And what need do superior beings have for a greater superior being?’

It might also be, I continued, that the Worldstorm hindered us in our search for order amid the chaos. For the ’Storm was chaos, pure and undiluted, and from its permanence and ubiquity one could only infer that chaos was the norm. The order of things was chaos.

And then – blame the whisky – I began to tell him what I was up to with Yashu and Gregory, why I had brought them together, what I hoped to achieve. It felt good to say it aloud again. I had discussed it with you, with Traven Keech, but otherwise only with myself in the debating chamber of my brain, where nothing is ever resolved beyond doubt. It felt good to lay my scheme out before someone fresh, and moreover a disinterested party, someone who stood to gain nothing by acclaiming it and lose nothing by rubbishing it. Not only that but it felt fair. Querennion had over the past week exposed himself to my scrutiny, using me as a sounding-board for his ideals and cherished conceits. Here was I, returning the favour.

‘A child to defeat the Worldstorm,’ he exclaimed. ‘Is it possible? How?’

I told him I didn’t know. One of my theories was that the child might, by its very arrival, set up some countervailing force that negated the ’Storm, as a gust of wind snuffs a flame, although I thought this unlikely. Alternatively the child might, when it reached the appropriate age, manifest some hitherto unknown Inclination – an Inclination of staggering proportions, sufficiently powerful to meet the ’Storm on equal terms and hammer it into submission. Or else the child might simply grow up into an adult who would devise some ingenious practical method of taming the ’Storm and would mobilise men and nations into putting the method into action. All I could propound with any certainty is that, as the fusion of all four Inclinations, the child surely had a unique destiny before it.

‘But the chances are it’s happened before,’ Querennion said. ‘Male and female, each a different mix of Inclination, meeting, coupling, having a baby. I can’t believe, in all the generations there have been, with all the millions of people who’ve walked on this earth, it hasn’t happened before.’

‘No doubt it has,’ I said. ‘But neither Gregory nor Yashu is simply a “mix” of Inclination. Each is a rarity – Earth emerging from a long and scrupulously maintained Fire lineage, Air emerging from an insular, inbred Water race. A genealogical freak. The chances of two of those meeting are remote, and the chances of offspring resulting, infinitesimal.’

‘A world without the Worldstorm,’ Querennion mused. He was liking the idea. Who wouldn’t? For him, however, it had an added attraction. ‘Imagine if, when the ’Storm was gone, Inclination went with it. I mean, for argument’s sake this is. Assuming your crackpot scheme even works. Inclination came about as recompense for the ’Storm, so it stands to reason that with the ’Storm banished Inclination would disappear too.’

I bit my tongue. For one thing – ‘crackpot’? Who was this god-believing, cave-dwelling Extraordinary to call me ‘crackpot’? And for another thing – no more Inclination? Now that was crackpot. Why I bit my tongue, though, wasn’t a sudden attack of politeness. Rather, prevision was telling me Querennion was about to say something very useful and it would be unwise to antagonise him.

‘Well now, listen,’ he said. ‘You’re planning on getting the two youngsters together, and from what I’ve seen they’re not exactly, you know’ – he interlaced the fingers of both hands – ‘like that. You need time and isolation, am I right? You need to get Gregory and Yashu in a place where you can work on them undisturbed. Have them face shared hardships, maybe. Forge a bond that way. Does that sound right?’

I nodded. ‘That sounds like just what I need.’

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Then I think I know where you can go. I ought not to be doing this, but if there’s just the tiniest possibility that what you’re up to might succeed...’ He picked up the whisky bottle, now almost empty, a last rinse of liquor tinkling inside it. ‘Want to know where I got this from? I’ll tell you.’

And the where was here, this hunting lodge. This was Querennion’s destination on those infrequent excursions he made away from the ravine. He had discovered it a decade back when wandering up the mountainside genuinely for the purpose of finding solitude and fasting. The lodge had been empty but its cellar, as we know, well stocked. Querennion had roamed its rooms, seeing soft beds, sheets, pillows, windows that sealed out draughts. Tempted, he had succumbed, and spent three days and nights wallowing in pleasures he thought he had forfeited for ever. Unbending his spine onto a plush mattress. Lowering himself into the sweet, near-forgotten embrace of alcohol. Indulging mind and body until a sense of duty reasserted itself like a dash of ice water and he went scrambling back down to the cave, wracked with guilt.

But he returned to the hunting lodge. Once or twice a year, when he needed respite, up he would go. He learned that summer and early autumn was not the time to visit. That was hunting season and the lodge’s owner was likely to be in residence, with friends. But in early spring and late autumn it invariably lay unoccupied. It was Querennion’s own little hidey-hole then, his secret refuge from Trusteedom. In winter, of course, the lodge was unreachable. Snows surrounded it, blocking all access. During those three to four months it was cut off, a manmade island in a frozen ocean. He didn’t know if people could survive there all that time but reckoned it would be feasible. Difficult but feasible.

He debated whether to tell me actually how to get to the lodge. The occasional overnight stay by one person, the odd bottle of booze missing from the cellar, could pass undetected. But four people staying for the whole winter? When the lodge’s owner, that wealthy Xarridian or Otrean or whoever he was, returned in the summer, the evidence of squatters would be hard to miss and he would surely take measures to prevent further trespass on his property, with the result that Querennion would lose his secret bolthole. Then again, perhaps it was time he gave it up anyway. He never returned from one of his brief sojourns there undogged by feelings of shame.

He gave me the necessary directions, which I repeated to my enshriner at the first opportunity so that at least one of us would not forget them. We set out for the lodge the very next morning. Yashu, interestingly, did not offer any objection. She seemed perhaps sad to be leaving the cave but content to be carrying on with our little party.

It was a hard two days’ walking, uphill all the way, up out of the ravine, up through pine forests, up above the treeline, finally here. We had supplies from the Trustees to keep us going, not much but enough. We spent the night on beds of pine needles, with the constellations peeping down at us through the trees’ feathery fronds. The lodge came into view on the afternoon of the second day: a long, low building with a veranda along its front and this turret room its only upper storey, rising above a shelving roof supported by projecting timbers, with a broad, squat chimney stack nearby. The lodge was perched at the lip of the lake, which reflected an inverted lodge in its mirror-sheen surface. The surrounding slopes formed a natural depression, like a bowl – no, a crucible. Yes, a crucible. A thing in which raw materials are smelted and fashioned into a pure and useful form.

From then till now, this was our abode. Home for our strange four-strong family.

And there, Khollo, an end to another day’s dictation. I was going to mention something I heard this very morning, not long after dawn. A particular set of sounds that would seem to mean... But no. I shall leave it for now. I’ve already gone on at greater length than usual. If repeated tomorrow, the sounds will confirm what I suspect, and I look forward to that in the calming near-certainty that they will be repeated tomorrow.