“Tomorrow,” she said, sleepy. Her nose was smaller, and it twitched at the end. “One last night of rest, and we’ll start tomorrow.”
So the next sunset they stopped and foraged hard, collecting for their waist bags a bit of everything that was not granite itself, and they kept walking as the sun’s light dimmed in the eastern sky, until only a few clouds high over the eastern sea caught a dim red glow in the deep indigo; and then by the light of the million stars they stumbled on.
Even in these remote heights the trail continued to wind its way along the spine crest, weaving to north or south depending on the shape of the rock and the cliffs on each side. The trail was in poor repair and had not been used, it appeared, in years. Sometimes, because it was the only flatness in a vertical landscape, and had been crushed to sand over the centuries, it was the only foothold for the green moss, so that a mossy path extended through the white rock, a highly visible black sidewalk in the starry night. Elsewhere the trail was just a slightly less obstacle-filled track of blasted rock, and nearly impossible to see. They kept losing it and coming on it again, and each time they rediscovered it Thel felt a tiny bit of satisfaction, of communion across time with whoever had built the trail; they had both picked the same route as best. And now it was essential that they keep to that route, if they were not to come to some impassable drop-off or rise; so in places they moved on hands and knees, feeling for sand and the intangible traces of earlier feet. At times they could move their heads to the side and stare straight down to the obsidian sea, flat and glossy some thousands of feet below; then they crawled, happy to hug the rock, long past talk, merely panting, gasping, from time to time whimpering or cursing under their breath, or simply groaning.
It was a long night. When dawn came and light leaked back into the world, in the hour when everything was made of translucent slabs of gray, Thel looked at the swimmer and observed that her whole shape was changing; torso longer, feet longer, ribs visible but not quite human, she was making a slow transformation back to something clearly aquatic—as she had always been, but now it was more pronounced, obvious that her race had descended from some fluid water mammal. She would be forced to crawl all the time if the transformation continued. And if her joints felt anything like his… he exerted the discipline, peered through the black haze of pain, saw that his own legs were thicker and his arms longer and heavier: it was a comfortable prospect to walk on all fours, and climbing the endless granite staircase of the spine was in some senses a happy challenge. Tree ancestor, he thought, and the image of a quick beautiful creature came into his mind, with the word baboon.
When the sun rose behind them, he looked at the ridge ahead carefully. This was the time of day when Tinou, looking back into the western dawn, would have trouble spotting them; while they looked up the ridge for him with the blaze of a nearby star as their spotlight. And eventually Thel’s patience was rewarded. A head popped over the rock, just above and beyond them, a few minutes’ walk only, and Tinou emerged, looked back blindly into the sun, and then hiked east up the ridge trail.
All that day they hunted him, hiding when he looked back, and so losing some ground on him. In pain as they were, they could not keep pace with him in any case. But after sunset they caught sight of him, settling for the night at a flat spot in the trail.
There was still a trace of dusk in the sky when they crawled silently over the granite knobs to his camp. He was sleeping in the trail’s sand, rolled in a blanket, or so they thought; but as they crept toward him his eyes opened, the whites reflecting starlight so that it seemed two glittery little jewels had popped into being, and with a laugh he said, “What persistent little things, crawling around in the night! Come out in the open, my little ones!”
He was standing over them. “My, my.” Amusement made his beautiful voice bounce musically, a low fast burble. “A monkey and a water rat, it seems! Following me all this way, whatever for?” He loomed over Thel, and anger threaded into the amusement: “What kind of creature jumps through the mirror, eh? What kind of thing?”
But Thel and the swimmer were long past the snare of language, long past even much hearing Tinou’s beautiful voice. He seemed to recognize this, for when they stood and approached him, spreading out to come at him from two sides, he retreated to the flat spot and his blanket.
“We want the mirror,” Thel croaked, shuffling in toward him, sidling at angles in hopes of getting close more quickly than Tinou could notice. “Give it to us and we’ll call it quits.”
Tinou laughed and reached down into his blankets, pulled out the mirror bag. He held it out, then swung it around to throw it over the cliff into the southern sea—but he had not reckoned on Thel’s new animal swiftness, and the bag crashed into Thel’s upper arm as Thel rushed forward, and quicker than Thel could react or plan his numbed arm had caught Tinou by the throat and the claws of his other hand were raking Tinou’s face and knocking aside the flailing arms, and then with tremendous force he caught up the sorcerer’s head in both hands and threw the man’s whole body to the ground. The swimmer dove and bit the bent and exposed neck, and awkwardly she got to her feet and they stood watching Tinou’s blood drain out of him. Mortality, how strange: that Tinou, who had given them so much, was now gone! That he had left no more behind than this! It was hard to grasp.
Thel recovered the mirror bag and checked inside it; the mirror was unbroken, its surface the color of the sky some hour or two before. Meanwhile the swimmer had taken a knife from Tinou’s bag, then found a firestone and clapper. The skeleton of a dead juniper stood twisted in the lee of boulders protecting the flat, and they broke it apart right down to the ground, bashing it with rocks they could barely lift. Thel started a fire while the swimmer cut away the skin over Tinou’s thighs and buttocks, and hacked out big steaks that they roasted on sticks of juniper. When they were full they slept all the way through to dawn, warmed by the coals of the fire, and their first real meal in weeks.
30. The Green Flash
They woke in the late morning and hiked on, continuing eastward without discussion; it seemed clear to Thel that it was necessary, that they could not recross the mirror’s smooth barrier on the site of Tinou’s murder. That, in fact, there was a specific moment when it would be possible, a time and a place of which he knew nothing. They would have to watch. Without speaking of it he knew the swimmer had come to the same conclusion.
So they hiked on. The spine continued to rise, a granite wall splitting the sea, curving sinuously left and right, its top edge shattered over the eons into a broken split serrated knife-edge of a ridge, rising unevenly as they crawled antlike along it. Often they crawled in the literal sense, as it was too painful and precipitous to walk. The moss grew less frequently here and they were often hungry, they often recalled the delicious meal of Tinou and regretted bitterly not staying to eat all of him, or at least not taking with them his heart and liver, they drooled thinking of it. “But livers make you mad,” Thel said, “someone told me. Livers and life.”
Hunger made them light and they found they could almost float up smaller aretes, just a touch here and there on the rough grainy rock, something to keep them from blowing away—to keep their shells from blowing away—everything inside having danced off on the wind. Once Thel tried to tell the swimmer how he felt about that, and he couldn’t find the words to express it. He listened to the thin slow trickle of his thoughts and was surprised to hear how simple it bad become: I am climbing. I will always climb. The ocean is far below. That is a rock. I hope we find some moss. These were his thoughts. And all that great whirling maelstrom of feeling and significance, of meaning: on the other side of the mirror* back down the peninsula among his forgotten friends, adventures, hopes, loves, dreams. All the dreams forgotten in the moment of waking, the flight that mattered so much… it was strange to no longer desire his desires, to look at the swimmer and see a broken ancient animal, to understand that all their love had been a way of fixing time, each embrace a moment’s touch of the eternal, because the caress preserves. And yet here he crawled, something like a baboon, long-knuckled hairy claws at the end of furred forearms, next to something like an otter, and only her eyes remained hers, the face he remembered mostly gone, but all of it evoked by those calm black eyes unfogged by the pain that crippled her gait, clear and calm and looking around, still capable of that small ironic amused squint, as when she laid her forearm next to his and said, “Now you see why we never had children.”