“Have you had it on Kosa Saag?”
“Twice.”
I looked into the starry darkness of the sky. To have such a dream up here—in the very abode of the gods—what could it mean? I had dreamed of splendors; she dreamed of death that was no death at all, but an infinite torture.
Her dream appalled me. I had never heard anything so frightening, so bleak. Death is nothing I spend much time thinking about; but I had always thought, as most of us do, that death is simply the end of life, a darkness, a silence, the return of our substance to the earth from which it came. Traiben and I had sometimes talked of it when we were young, and we both thought alike on the subject: there is no further awareness, any more than there is further light after a candle has been snuffed. It is an obliteration. One lives one’s four tens of years, or a few tens more if the gods have given one the privilege of double life, and then one is gone, and that is that. But this terrible vision of Hendy’s—this catastrophic fantasy of torment everlasting—it shook me as I have rarely been shaken. I lay awake for hours afterward, fearing that if I slept I would dream Hendy’s dream, and dreading it. In time sleep took me anyway, and I dreamed nothing that I particularly remembered the next day. But when I woke it was not the glory of my own divine vision that remained with me, but rather the nightmare desolation of the thing that Hendy had described.
I climbed like a madman that day, going almost at a sprint up the sloping side of the meadow where it gave way to the barrenness of the red mountain, and then along the face of the rock into the saddle. The others were hard pressed to match my pace and quickly fell behind me. And when I came up into the saddle I saw that on the far side of it it turned upward, so that it provided us with access to the next level of Kosa Saag, which began just beyond us. Muurmut’s sky-magic might have been a fraud and a bluff but it had brought us to the right place. I waited for them to catch up with me, and we halted and broke out the last of the wine that we had brought with us from home, and passed it around, hardly more than a few drops apiece. I called out a toast to Muurmut. Let him bask in his glory. What did that matter to me? We were on our way up again.
“Muurmut!” they all cried. “Muurmut, Muurmut, Muurmut!”
He grinned and smirked like the fool that he was. But we were on our way up. The gods in their crystal-columned palace awaited us at the Summit. Or so I told myself, in the hope that I could drive from my mind that other vision of darkness and terror and eternity spent in a box no bigger than my body.
We emerged into a new realm entirely, a bare craggy land of broken red rock carved into a myriad fantastic forms, with caves and fluted spires and turrets everywhere. The sky was cloudless and a deep intense blue, a strange blue that was bluer than we had ever seen it. Little streams ran in rocky beds. After the sharp and frosty weather we had had below, the air was surprisingly warm and mellow here, but we had long since given up trying to understand the rhythms and climates of Kosa Saag. We knew that we were in another world up here.
The mountain rose before us as if in a series of wide flat steps. It looked as though we need do nothing more than put our feet to the first of those steps, and merely go up and up and up until we were at the top. But I sensed that when we actually reached the first of those great stone shelves we would discover that we were no bigger than so many grains of sand against it, and the climb would be no easy thing.
I ordered a pause for gathering food and water, for it looked like dry hard country ahead. While this was going on I went forward a little distance to reconnoiter, taking Traiben with me for company. But I said little as we walked, and when Traiben spoke to me I answered in the shortest way.
“Your mood is very somber,” he said after a while, “for one who has just taken himself a new lover.”
“Yes,” I said. “So it is.”
“It can be that way sometimes, I suppose. When you attain a long-held desire, and find that the reality can never be equal to the—”
“No,” I said, snapping the word at him. “What do you know about these things? It’s nothing like that!”
“Well,” said Traiben, then. “I am mistaken. I beg your pardon, Poilar.”
And now he was silent, and we walked on that way through a long morning, like two strangers trudging side by side on the same path. Both suns were in the sky. In the thin air of this high country, where there was not a single cloud to shelter us, white Ekmelios burned with great fury and even the distant red sphere of Marilemma seemed to be throwing forth heat upon us. The land began to rise steeply, and as I had suspected the terrain grew more parched the farther we went. And yet I felt a curious emanation coming from the first level of the stepped mountain ahead of us, an odd kind of beckoning, as though a deep sleepy voice were saying. Yes, this is the way, come to me, come to me, come, come.
I said finally, growing troubled by Traiben’s silence and feeling abashed at having spoken to him so harshly, “My mood is dark, I think, because of a dream of Hendy’s, that she told me a few nights back while we were in the valley. The shadow of that dream lies over me even now.”
And I told it to him, just as Hendy had told it to me. When I was done I was shaking with the horror of it all over again; but Traiben only shrugged and said, without much feeling, “The poor woman. What a dark and fantastic notion that is to carry around in one’s head.”
“What if it isn’t just a fantastic notion, though? What if something like that really happens to us when we die?”
He laughed. “After death there is nothing, Poilar. Nothing. ”
“How can you be so sure of that?”
“We talked of this when we were boys, do you remember? Does a candle burn when you put out the flame?”
“We are not candles, Traiben.”
“It’s the same thing. Out we go and that’s the end.”
“And if not?”
He shrugged again. I could see that Hendy’s dream was having no impact on him at all. Or else he was taking great pains to conceal it. Perhaps Hendy was a sore subject with him. It had happened before that he saw some new woman of mine as an impediment to our friendship.
The mountain still seemed to be calling. Come … come … come … What could that be?
But I hesitated to ask Traiben if he felt the same call, for fear that he would think I was suffering from hallucinations. We seemed to be on uneasy terms with each other this day. Our souls were farther apart than I could remember their ever having been.
To lighten things a little I started telling him of my own dream, the happy one of the golden and glittering gods in their wondrous sunlit palace atop the Wall. But Traiben scarcely seemed to be listening. He glanced this way and that, he picked up stones and skipped them into the air, he shaded his eyes and peered off into the distance.
“Am I boring you?” I asked, when I was no more than halfway through.
“It’s a lovely dream, Poilar. Very pretty indeed.”
“But a little on the simple-minded side.”
“No. No. A beautiful vision.”
“Just a vision, yes. And Hendy’s dream is just a nasty fantasy. There’s no reality at all to either of them, is that right?”
“Who can say? We won’t know what death is really like until we die. Nor will we know what the gods are like until we reach the Summit.”
“I prefer to think that the gods are as I saw them in my dream. That perhaps the dream itself was a sending from them, urging us to be steadfast, to stay on the upward trail.”
Traiben gave me a strange look at that. “A sending, you think? Well, maybe so.” After a moment he said, “I would rather believe in your dream than in Hendy’s. But we won’t know until we know. I once had a dream that was just the opposite of yours: did I ever tell you that, Poilar? A blasphemous dream, a really awful dream, a true nightmare. I dreamed that I reached the Summit—and there were the gods, all right, and they were loathsome twisted ghastly things, the most depraved of creatures, such bestial driveling monsters that they would make the Melted Ones look beautiful beside them. And that’s why no Pilgrims who have reached the Summit and returned will ever speak of what they have seen, because they can’t bear to reveal the frightful truth about the gods we worship.” He laughed again, the dry little Traiben-laugh that I knew so well, which was meant to be a casual dismissal of something that in fact was not at all casual to him. Then he said, “Speaking of sendings, have you been feeling anything of that sort while we’ve been walking along just now?”