CHAPTER FIVE: LAND BEYOND THE HILL

 

 

A tempestuous sky looked on as Ray slept, fading from violent black to passive gray. He awoke beneath this sky, not knowing whether it was day, night, or somewhere in between. He applied the cake-mud in grand doses, cringing as he did so, but telling himself it would eventually ease the stinging and prevent infestation. All the while, in the back of his mind, his only thought was the realization of whose eyes he had seen in the dream—the wizard’s.

 

He took a deep breath, latched onto his staff, using it to help him to his feet and once there, discovering that most of the pain and fatigue were gone. He crouched to his knees, leaning down carefully to get a small, unstoppered container, cursing as he did so. The long sap had been a precious gift and now it was gone. Nevertheless, he plugged the container’s top and dropped it into his bag.

 

Low banks of fog made progress arduous, but he crept on. This day the fog was not as big a hindrance as his weakened condition.

 

Hours passed, a fair distance traveled, he decided that he wasn’t really feeling all that poorly considering all that had happened, or could have happened. Lunch was a long, drawn-out affair that he should have never sat down to eat; the ground felt so soft, and the climb to his feet so far, though he eventually continued on.

 

His path growing further into obscurity, he picked his way with increasing care. Travel during the encroaching night would be out of the question and that suited him just fine. He managed step after step, working up to a rhythmic speed.

 

Rain returned as a fine mist, later turning to a light drizzle. His mood turned increasingly pensive and somber with the changing weather. A gray world made gray thoughts.

 

The stone land seemed so desperately far away and everywhere before him, he imagined he saw the white, white faces of the Out. But it was the one face that frightened him more than any other. The face with the deep set eyes, the face of the wizard.

 

Behind him, sometimes he thought he could hear voices, or make out dark shapes shifting about. Once he thought he had heard Tall’s voice, though he couldn’t be sure. In a sense, his own voice was telling him that home was behind and nothing was ahead, and while he wanted to listen to the voice, he couldn’t.

 

An image whirred before his eyes, the foreboding hill, rising up from his lowland home. “The land does not shift, nor quake, not even a tremble,” a voice whispered to him, “It is torrid, staunch and dead.”

 

Ray stopped, checked his course, momentarily catching a glimpse of a pale, fiery ball in the sky. He snapped out of his reverie. Afternoon, he reminded himself. He crossed over to the next dwelling with care, making a short leap.

 

After bypassing a mixing of byways, he began to look for a place to spend the night. Near exhaustion, he could not go on, nor would the light permit him to go on much farther. Using small steps, he trudged along his chosen path, the imaginary line between nowhere and somewhere.

 

The night would not be all bad; the drizzle had ceased its irritation. He wouldn’t find out for some hours that something special had chanced during his amblings this day, though it would upset him when he did.

 

Evening did not sweep in as it had the previous nights. It was more of a slow, gradual takeover from gray to black. Gray attempted to take a few steps back near the end, but the darker hue eventually won out, and night arrived. He found himself still on the move, and not wholly prepared to stop. His eyes had been ever adjusting to the trivial changes, and so for a while he had not noticed the arrival of night. It was the absence of change that aroused him to the fact, not the change itself.

 

The mist persisted, rising mostly from the wet in thick, billowy clouds, prodded into movement by small puffs of air that one could not call a wind since it really wasn’t blowing in any particular direction or with strength of purpose. Standing on a moist ledge, a twinge of pain came to him, first in his toes, and then up his foot.

 

Another time he would have cast it off, since his body was already fatigued and troubled by a number of small aches and pains, but the fog irritated him, and so he kicked out with his foot, stomped down. His foot came down on something slippery and slimy.

 

A whisper in his mind said, “Black sucker, Black sucker.” The bile in his mouth suddenly became abhorrence as his stomach soured. He despised suckers, large or small, it didn’t really matter, though the large ones were more dangerous, and the small more bothersome.

 

He maintained his retreat until he reached the center of the house where he set up camp for the night. It was during this preparation that he discovered something else. The small arbor encasement stirred with fresh life; the shell was broken.

 

He would not find rest as soon as he had wanted, though he was bold enough to hope that when the ordeal was ended he would be able to rest sounder and safer. Two tiny balls of pale red stared at him from the other side of the meshing on the container’s top.

 

He was overjoyed, though he wasn’t sure if his friend was completely out of the shell, or if only the head was free. He watched and waited, and the miracle unfolded to him in tiny sounds and pulsations from within the container.

 

He hadn’t expected this time to come for several days. He had not even cleansed his mind or performed any of the normal ritualistic preparations. He had been too caught up in his own affairs and now something that would affect the whole of his life and the scope of his journey had unfolded without him.

 

He was on the outside looking in. His face was pressed so close to the mesh that when the unexpected flicker of tongue touched his nose, he cried out, startling the little slither, and sending it racing away into the shadows.

 

“I’m sorry. It won’t happen again,” Ray whispered, and though it seemed he was talking to himself he carried on, “Come on, you can come back. I’m not going to hurt you.”

 

Turning a cupped hand up, he released the latch on the container’s meshed top. A flood of the elder’s words flowed through his mind as he did this. “The first moments of meeting are the most important. First impression is the lasting impression. Be true to your intentions, and voice them to him, and if he is willing, he will accompany you, and if not, he will turn away.”

 

Before his eyes, images of all he had endured to get to this point raced, emotions sweeping across his face and playing with the pounding of his heart. He looked ahead now, as far as he dared to reach. “When it is over, you will be free, if it is your wish,” he whispered as his thoughts raced on, not lingering long on that one rationalization. He closed his eyes and pleaded.

 

The tiny slither had his wits about him. The calling of the wet and freedom beckoned, and he crawled across his hand, flopping onto the refreshing, wet ground. It did not stop there, though it hesitated briefly. He did not know this; he only knew it was gone. Fearing he might accidentally squash it, he froze in place for a long time, finally crouching down to his haunches, where sleep would later find him.

 

A clear day came but he did not welcome it. Finding himself alone, he wallowed in self-pity. A late start allowed the last remnants of the haze to burn off. Food was tasteless as it passed his palate. He ate for subsistence, nothing more. He came to the edge of the wet, closely viewing its every nuance: a ripple, a wave, a branch or twig floating past.

 

He considered his quest at an end. He would find no new love, no new bond, for his realm, only remorse and perhaps in the end disdain. The connecting link had been severed before it had begun and he had no one to blame but himself, and this was a momentous burden for him to carry.

 

At that moment, the instant where he considered turning back and running home, which he could have done easily though the consequences would have been severe, a voice whispered in his thoughts, “Go until you think you can’t go any more, and then go just a little bit more…”

 

He gazed at the rising sun, into the wide space highlighted by its passing, realizing then that he did not want to turn back. He wanted to go on, to go on until he could not go on any more. He couldn’t have known that at that moment, tucked within the shadows of its new home, the tiny slither waited. No, he had made his decision independent of this, and it was something that would stick in his mind for a long, long time to come.

 

The previous day’s precipitation, not at all uncommon, had made the residences wet and slick, and everything he brushed against irritated him. He trudged through thick mud, hard slippery rock, and through the wet itself, in unceasing repetition. It was during this, some hours later, that he found himself sinking in wet and muck up past his knees, balancing himself with his staff, and trying to pull himself out with little fortune.

 

Even before starting into the crossing, he had seen Old Bull lounging on a large, dry rock. And there Ray stood, stuck, sinking, but Old Bull, somewhat cocked off to one side of the large, protruding boulder, didn’t budge, and Ray would never know why.

 

At about waist height, Ray stopped sinking into the muck, and now the only question that remained was how he would break free. With his walking stick, he tested the depth around him, driving it down and prying it out afterward. He could try to back out, but that wouldn’t necessarily solve his problem.

 

He slipped the pack off his shoulders, allowing it to float free and luckily the seals held or it would have sunk straight to the bottom and disappeared. Still, he made enough noise that he didn’t hear the bull’s careful slip from the rock and he panicked a moment later when he noticed the emptiness. His wild thrashing only worked him deeper into the muck.

 

Re-collecting thought, he tested his weight against the pack, utilizing leverage from his staff, though he did not lift far, and as soon as the leverage waned, he sank back down to where he had begun. He twisted right, bending back, scanning the surface, probing with his stick, did the same to the left. Off to his right was a partially submerged trunk, blackened and ripened by the wet, yet it was just beyond arm’s reach.

 

Hearing no sounds of movement nearby, and alarmed by this silence, he returned to frantic engagement. Eventually, he worked one leg free, but as it became unglued he toppled over, finding himself gargling the murky substances he had been churning up. Arms flailing, legs kicking, staff in one hand, pushing the pack in the other and using it for ballast, he scrambled, giving it his all.

 

Old Bull looked on from a new vantage point, mostly oblivious to the hand that stroked its oblong head and whispered things it understood but barely so. Bathing in the bright, warm sunshine, satisfied with the fledgling’s crossing, it closed its eyes, scratching with absent direction at the moistened earth beneath it. It would wait for a while longer before pushing on its way.

 

Ray brushed himself down, cleaning away most of the muck with a bit of grit, making for the low rounding he gleaned in the distance. He had not recognized Old Bull, nor seen the grizzled, timeworn elder stroking the bull’s head. This was just as well, as Ray wouldn’t have understood.

 

Ray sucked in at the air, fighting a burning weariness. He knew better than to persist in respite, but he did not heed this knowledge. He lunched early and ate more than he should have, reworking the cake-mud when he had finished and leaving himself a reminder that he needed to collect more supplies: two pieces of weed-grass, the thick, limber tufts from down near the root, which he tied around his left wrist.

 

He leaned heavily on his staff as he surveyed the distance and the close. “One step at a time,” offered a whisper in a melancholy tone. Ray took a laden step forward, and thus he continued on his way. The stone land beckoned. My path is long, he thought, considering the weight of the words upon him. He did not jump, nor skip, nor did he take joy in the sense of the hunt; he simply moved on.

 

The avenues he ambled across, shifting from house to house, faded rapidly away from memory and sight. It was under a mid-afternoon sun that he descried a low scrub not far off and he wrestled with an undeniable yearning to stop for the day. He knew he could rest there in the scrub’s shade and watch the night pull in. The temptation grew until it took a conscious effort to maintain his pace as he crossed the residence.

 

He dropped the pack from his shoulder in front of the scrub, slumping down to his knees, mindful of the waiting shade. He slipped the seal, delving inside the pack until he came upon a dark, round leaf.

 

Skillfully, he divided the leaf into two pieces, slipping one into his mouth between cheek and gum, and the other he sacrificed to the shade. He lingered no longer, however. He hated the pasty taste of the black leaf and so he could envy without regret.

 

A partial grimace touched his countenance as he came to a new house. He recalled with distinction a day Ephramme and Keene had been selected and not him and Tall. Tall had been the one to slip the half leaf into their packs, claiming a piece for himself and giving Ray the other.

 

Ray didn’t understand at first, though later he had. He wondered how long he could keep the paste at the side of his cheek this time, thus holding his muse. Tall had also been the one that had told him to take the black nut, though Ray still saw no use for it.

 

A childhood rhyme came to mind. “Scatter bush and weed-grass blowing in the wind. Scatter bush and weed-grass shaking in the rain. Scatter bush and weed-grass sticking through it all.” Ray chuckled to himself, hearing the mild, playful voice of his mother in his ear, more memories of the past. He repeated the words now from the rest of the rhyme, softly aloud as he walked. “The tall, the thick, the wide, the deep, in and around, out and in, out and around, scatter bush and weed-grass,” there were more lines, and though he knew them all, he stopped. He was mindful of his step again, and that which was around him.

 

The playful thoughts didn’t stop the weariness from setting through him sooner than he would have hoped, and after venturing across a second widening, one neighborhood farther along his path, he called it a full day. His body demanded rest, regardless of the lingering light above, and heedless of the paste on cheek and gum. He did not find such a comfortable spot as he had passed up, yet he did not care. Immediately after laying stinging to ground, he went to sleep, and many dreams played out and in before his unhindered eyes.