It was a quiet night that slivered into dawn. No wind breathed, no snow fell. Swathes of the early sun’s shifting white light refracted in the sparkling crystals. They had been on the road for an hour and were still sleepy. They were climbing steadily higher, following the edge of frozen land that would lead to the great mass of the glacier. Its smooth, unearthly silver gleam already dominated the distant horizon, suggesting both a land of unreachable celestial perfection and a brooding monster best left in perpetual slumber. It was from there, looking down and beyond, that they got their first glimpse of the Von Lyrehnbok ravine.
The Oracle started to shudder, its small yapping sounds rattling its crate and causing the old mule that bore it to flinch and step out of its own dream, stumbling slightly on the icy path. The presence of the glacier excited the Oracle, something about the draining starlight ricocheting off its surface, the touch, the tinder of it. The nearest lip of the glacier sprawled eighty miles north of the ravine and sent millions of tons of meltwater cascading through it. In quiet times like these, you could sometimes hear the glacier sigh, groan, or explode, sending the profundity of its voice echoing beneath all other sounds and substance. A crack or a boom from the interior of its restless motion sounded like the Author of All Things speaking to the land in a language older than time.
It was a long, intense ride that morning. The old bones of the men, mules, and horses warmed up only after an hour or so. They crept along the high ridge and eventually joined the rim of fast water.
“How far do we have to go before we sight Das Kagel?” asked Pearlbinder, drawing his horse up behind Follett.
“Truth is, I don’t really know. Somewhere after we cross another mountain beyond the cataract. I have only been given stages along this journey. We must trust in the Blessed One to steer us between them.”
Pearlbinder made a noise in his throat that could have been dulcet agreement or a growl of disdain. At this early hour, it was impossible to distinguish between the two.
The great Brow waterfall grew in voice and dominance with each careful step. One side of the narrow track looked straight down into the rock gulley, which tumbled and gushed with the tons of water cascading from the massive waterfall. Each man held the reins of his mount in a vicelike grip, keeping all their attention on the next step. There were contrasts of the natural world here that many of the party had never seen; water crashing in tons of violent fluidity next to water locked into frozen braids, signs of its agitation still visible, like carved marble.
The nervous trees that clung to the edge of the waterfall and the path were patchy and torn. Great lumps had been ripped out by the torrent. The men saw fragments of the skeletal remains of bridges that had been erected to cross the maelstrom at its thinnest path and when the water was at its lowest. The wreckage was proof enough that this was the only way they were going to get across and then down the mountain. Follett waved the party forward, and the reluctant horses and mules needed strict guidance to do anything other than turn and flee. So they were made to bleed and smart, to move on along the ledge, the tilted land around the roaring power of the great cataract.
Strange white protuberances flocked along the sides of the thin, slippery path. They had been normal plants at one time, but the constant mist from the crashing waters had frozen them again and again, so the leaves and stems had become smothered and stilled into vague fingerlike forms of uniform white, an army of sea anemones locked in a long seasonal stasis. Frozen claws of ice came up to grab them. Each man’s life flickered into silence under the roar of this world.
To avoid eternity, they had to work together against the moment, to shout at one another as they dismounted and pulled the animals toward more substantial land and the shelter of the thicket. The hair on their heads and on the horses’ manes and tails was beginning to stand up, and some of their metallic possessions were becoming animated in air full of virulent static electricity generated by the water’s speed and the land’s resistance. They ducked their heads and dragged their mounts into the trees, where some of the Brow’s power lessened and the magnetism faded.
They stood dripping and unsure of what to do next when a giant stepped out from behind a massive tree.
He was over nine feet tall and dressed in the way of prophets: animal skins over an ancient, threadbare robe. He carried a menacing staff and spoke in a voice that filled the trees. “Do you seek cleansing or passage?”
O’Reilly unsheathed his sword, ready to kill the monstrous man. The giant shot out his hand like a piston and a rock flew forward, hitting O’Reilly in the chest, cracking his sternum and nearly dividing his rib cage. The expression on his face was beyond description.
“Weapons are forbidden here!” boomed the giant.
Pearlbinder had been slowly easing his large-bore Safavid rifle out of its ornate scabbard when Follett gripped his arm and strangled the motion.
“Don’t!” he commanded.
The giant’s head was entirely swathed in bandages; their woven delineation covered something that was not even vaguely human in shape, being more horizontal than vertical.
Pearlbinder moved forward. The others were locked in an overpowering sense of awe; even the animals hung their heads and looked away from the towering apparition. Pearlbinder stepped closer, a genuine respect welling up in him. The words arose through his learning and his hunger at the gates of bewilderment: “Sir, Master, I believe thou be of the Cercopithecidae, a bloodline of—”
“No! I am a man,” the giant cried. “As a man cursed with the plague of leper, I tie my head in this way to contain its flesh and spare any trespasser the sight of its malignancy.”
“But, Brother!”
“I am not your brother. I am he who was born wild, whose hand is turned against all men. And all men’s hands turneth against me.”
Pearlbinder was silenced but kept slowly moving toward the giant. He needed to witness his existence up close, to be in the proximity of a being from another world, even if the being did not understand its own meaning. The air was disturbed by O’Reilly’s falling from his horse and screaming on the iced ground.
“Put away thy weapons and he will be healed,” the booming voice declared.
Follett got off his horse and walked over to his fallen man. He gave the order to sheath and stash all weapons. In three strides, the giant crossed through them and knelt by his victim, placing his hand on his chest.
After a long while, he pulled more of the same bandages that covered his head out of a satchel, making a long, twisted sheet between his hands. He then lifted his pointed head, gargled, and heaved up a great wad of phlegm, glutinous and colorless in consistency, which he spat into the cloth through a gap in his bandaged head. He wound the steaming folds tightly around the wounded man. He then lifted O’Reilly as if he were no more than a bundle of dry twigs. Pain and horror made O’Reilly turn gray, edged in blue. The giant carried the poor man off into the thicket, to a place where a vivid shaft of sunlight had penetrated the cold. He put O’Reilly down in its unexpected warmth, watching as the pain vanished and the rag solidified and shrank. The shock made his patient pass out. The sullen loops of the bandage came undone and were caught up by the great magnetism. Their ends rose and floated slowly about in the bright air, becoming weightless and balletic in their motion.
The men watched, entranced. The giant turned and made his way back through the trees. “Art thou going over?” he queried as he approached Follett.
“We seeketh a way to Das Kagel,” he answered. “How do we cross?”
“I carry thee across the waters.”
“But the horses?”
“I carry thee on them.”
“And the tariff for your work?”
“A companion.”
“Companion?”
“Leave someone just for me.”
Follett looked around to see if the men could hear this conversation.
“I will take the damaged one; he is of no use to thee.”
“But O’Reilly is our…”
Then he stopped and weighed the words he was about to speak.
“If thou taketh him, he will die,” the giant pressed.
Follett agreed to leave O’Reilly. “We will take his horse with us.”
“No, we will need it,” said the giant.
“For what?”
“To eat.”
Follett quickly changed the subject to their crossing, pointing to the water and turning all eyes away from the glowing rags in the beam of sunlight deep in the trees.
“Now,” said the giant, “tie everything down and I will take thee.”
They followed him along a winding path close to the edge of the raging waters, eventually stopping at a place where the trail widened, giving the water a larger, shallower space. Boulders and polished slabs of stone stuck out of the speeding torrent and shone against the sun. The giant pointed and gave directions to the riders. A terrible fear hovered over them.
Pearlbinder broke the spell by edging Sophia, his trusted mount, forward and announcing, “I shall go first, Great Master.”
“So be it,” said the giant, pointing to a flat stone in the water where the crossing would begin.
Pearlbinder blindfolded Sophia and whispered in her ear, then rode her onto the slippery rock. The giant discarded his rags and his staff before wading into the water. He came up like a mer-king on the other side of the rock, beneath the horse, his thick arms grasping her legs, his neck and shoulders bearing the animal’s belly as he lifted beast and rider in one solid action.
Pearlbinder hung on tight, flattening his body along the line of the horse as the giant turned and made his way from one rock to another. The monstrous river seemed to divide against his power. None of the men had ever seen anything like this. The giant’s strength was amazing, his practiced footfall sturdy and without doubt. He placed Pearlbinder and Sophia delicately on the other side before returning for the next man. Midstream, he seemed to glow magnificently in arches of rainbowing mist and gleaming ice. The only disconcerting thing was that his bandaged head had become wet in the process and its shape could now be more clearly defined. A huge canine profile shone under a halo of spume and flying spray.
“It is as it was spoken,” quoth Follett.
The giant made nine trips in all. When all the men were safely on the other side, he returned for the mules, carrying one under each arm. The third he treated with more reverence than anything else he had lifted that day.
Surely he was exhausted, surely he was slowing from fatigue—but no. The care he took in carrying his last, precious cargo was deliberate. This being knew what was in that box and how it was more precious than all the lives around it. But how? Follett had said nothing about the crate that housed the Oracle, and none of the other men, except Pearlbinder, even dared look at the giant. Having been so close to him in the crossing, feeling his power and protection, Pearlbinder was beginning to balance it against his terrible strangeness.
The giant cradled the third mule and its tethered crate, holding it tight against his chest with his staff laced beneath, like a mother carrying a child on the seat of a cross. He strode across the water toward them.
Now that they had crossed, Alvarez became impatient to move on, wanting to leave the memory of this place and the incident far behind him. His twitchiness infected his horse, causing it to shy and step backward, toward the water, just as the giant gave up his precious burden. The mule smelled the horse and started skidding on the wet rocks. The giant’s hands descended, clamping the mule and the crated Oracle back in place. But the Pyx of confessional bones tipped out of Alvarez’s saddlebag, emptying its contents into the water.
Alvarez cursed as Follett slid off his soaked horse and made a dash for the floating bones. The Oracle let out a cry from inside its crate, stopping everyone dead in their tracks. The voice found the bones that eddied and jostled, as if trying to escape into the open water. The sound hissed, sung, and attached itself to each fragment, like so many tiny sails unfurling as pennants, or like those convoluted scrolls of speech in medieval paintings, often called banderoles. All the men saw this, and Alvarez held his swiveling head and sight line steady on the bones as his nervous horse pirouetted in a full circle. It looked like words were illuminating and flickering there. Or was the spectrum of mist and sun lying?
Follett was on his knees, groveling in the fast shallows, pushing aside the frozen plants, splashing in the water, and catching the bobbing bones, his wet hands quivering. Suddenly the giant, who had released the now-stable mule and moved back out into the stream, swung his long staff and struck a submerged stone twenty feet out in the flood. It shifted and changed the dynamic of the current, which unbound the eddies that had kept the bones contained. They lurched forward, beyond Follett’s desperate reach, and entered the unstoppable waters.
Leaning on his staff, the giant looked back at Follett splashing to shore, crushing the dwarf forest of frozen plants, and burst into a deep and rolling laugh. It could be heard still above the roar of the Brow as he crossed the water. It still boomed and echoed when he reached the other side, entered the shivering trees of the copse, picked up O’Reilly and his horse, and disappeared.