“You look nothing like him. Not in the slightest regard.”
“Well, then, if that’s the case I must be very ugly now. Apparently I’ve undergone some disagreeable changes since coming to this mountain country. If I’m no longer as good to look upon as I once was, I beg you to forgive me for offending your eyes, my friend. Forgive me, all of you.” And in a courtly way he made a little ironic bow to the others, which brought uneasy smiles to their faces. “But I am Thrance, son of Timar, former Pilgrim of Jespodar, all the same.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not.”
“If I’m not Thrance, then who am I, pray tell?”
“How would I know? You could be anyone. Or anything. A demon. A ghost. A god in disguise.”
He gave me that death’s-head grin of his. “Yes,” he said. “I could be. Sandu Sando, perhaps, or Selemoy of the suns. But in fact I am Thrance. The son of Timar the Carpenter, who was the son of Diunedis.”
“Any demon could spout Thrance’s lineage at me,” I told him. “But that wouldn’t make the demon Thrance.”
The stranger looked amused, or perhaps he was merely growing bored with my obstinacy. “Against arguments of that kind no one could ever convince anyone of anything, isn’t that so? I could name my forefathers for ten generations, or all the twenty Houses of the Village, or the other members of my Forty, or anything else you might ask, and you would still say that the demon has picked it out of Thrance’s mind for the sake of deceiving you. Very well, then. Believe what you want. It makes no difference to me. But I tell you I am Thrance.”
I looked toward Kath and said, “Where did this man come from?”
“He simply appeared among us,” Kath said. “As if he had risen right out of the ground.”
“A demon would do that,” I said, with a glance toward the stranger.
“Be that as it may,” said Kath. “One minute we were here by ourselves waiting for you to return and the next he was with us. ‘I am Thrance of Jespodar,’ he said. ‘Have any of you heard of Jespodar, here?’ And when we told him that we were Pilgrims from that very village he began to laugh like a wild man, and to leap up and down and dance about. Then suddenly he grew very stern and somber, and he caught me by the wrist with one hand and Galli by the other, and he said, ‘Who remembers Thrance, then? If you are truly of Jespodar, you would remember Thrance.’ And Galli said, ‘We were only children when you left, if you are Thrance. So we wouldn’t remember you clearly.’ He laughed at that and pulled her close to him and kissed her, and bit her cheek so that it stung, and said, ‘You’ll remember me now.’ Then she asked him about her older brother, who had been in the same Forty as Thrance, and he knew the brother’s name, all right, though he said he had no idea what had become of him, which made Galli start to cry; and then he asked for wine. I said we had none to give him. He got very angry at that, and said again that he was Thrance of Jespodar. To which Muurmut replied, ‘Thrance or no Thrance, we have no wine to give you.’ And then—”
“Enough,” I said. The stranger had wandered off during Kath’s recitation and was standing with Tenilda and Grycindil and a few of the other women. “He is much altered from the Thrance I remember, if in fact this is Thrance. Did he speak at all of what had happened to him?”
“No.”
I was unable to get from my mind that recollected image of the heroic Thrance in all his godlike beauty, nor could I easily reconcile it with the sight of that gaunt and hideously altered creature over there. But for his great height and the breadth of his shoulders there was scarcely anything about this ruined wreck of a man that might sustain his claim of being Thrance. And, although I have never been one to frighten easily, I felt a twinge of something close to fear now as I watched him among the women. There seemed to be madness in him, and some strange fury barely held in check. If he was Thrance, and had spent all these years on the Wall, he might be of some use as a guide to us in this new territory we had entered, or he might not; but almost certainly he was going to be troublesome. I found myself wishing most profoundly he had never appeared in our midst.
He was coming toward me again now, with his arm thrust through Tenilda’s. That sweet Musician looked as though she would gladly have been back on the plateau again rather than so close to this malformed creature that called itself Thrance.
He leaned close to me and said, “They claim you have no wine, Poilar. Is this so?”
“The wine is long since gone, yes.”
“But you must have some.” He winked. It was a cold dead-eyed wink, with little charm or playfulness to it. “Hidden away, for your own use, eh? Come, my friend. Share your wine with me, before we set out from this place to begin our climb together. For old Thrance’s sake. A toast to our success.”
“We have no wine,” I said.
“Of course you do. I know that you have. Do you realize how long it’s been since I’ve had anything decent to drink? Or how I’ve suffered, all alone here on this mountain, Poilar? So get out the wine, and let’s drink.” There was a flat tone in his voice that robbed his words of urgency. I knew he was simply testing me, trying to see how much power he could exert over me. Very likely he had no desire for wine at all. He winked again, a false one as before, and nudged me in what was meant to be a sly conspiratorial way, but lacked conviction. “Just the two of us, you and I. We are brothers of the crooked leg, aren’t we? Look—look—mine’s even worse than yours!”
“The Thrance I remember had straight legs,” I said. “And there is no wine.”
“You still won’t believe that I am who I say I am.”
“I have nothing to go by except your word.”
“I have nothing to go by except your word, when you tell me you have no wine.”
“There is no wine.”
“And I am Thrance.”
“Then you are a Thrance transformed beyond all recognition,” I said.
“Well, so I am. But Kosa Saag is a place where transformations happen. You must always keep that in mind, my friend. And now, about that wine—”
“I’ll say it once more,” I told him, “and then not again. There is no wine.”
He gave me a skeptical look, as though he believed that if he only pressed me hard enough I would bring forth a flask from some secret cache. But there was no secret cache, and I looked at him in such a stony way that he saw that I either would not or, more likely, could not give him any.
“Well, then,” he said. “If you say so, it must be true. There is no wine. We are agreed on that. And I am Thrance. We are agreed on that, also. Eh? Good. Good. What shall we talk about next?”
But i had had enough of dueling with this man before all the others. I pointed toward an open place across the way, where we could be alone, and suggested we continue our conversation in private. He thought about that a moment and nodded, and we went limping off together, two crooklegs side by side, to sit by ourselves and talk. As he had said, that leg of his was far more of a deformity than mine. His limp was so bad that he walked in a twisted, lurching way, stepping halfway around himself to move forward, and I had to take something off my pace to accommodate him.
We found a fallen spire of rock nearby that we could use as a bench and sat down facing each other. I hesitated a little, arranging my thoughts, but he waited for me to begin. Perhaps he was developing some measure of respect for me.
“All right,” I said at last. “Why have you come here? What is it you want with us?”
His eyes brightened. For the first time there was true life in them, and not mere willed force. “I want to join your Forty. I want to climb with you to the Summit.”
“How would that be possible?”