I was eerily calm. Here is life, I thought. Here is death. You take your choice: a second or two returns you to youth, a minute kills. That seemed strange to me, and yet I felt little awe or wonder. I wanted neither youthfulness nor death from this place; I wanted only to have done the thing that I had done here at my father’s cairn, and move on. Perhaps I had been too long on Pilgrimage. Awe and wonder, I suspected, were things that I had left behind me somewhere along the trail, I suspected.
“So?” a rough voice said. “Shall we jump in and make ourselves prettier?”
Thrance. I turned to him, glaring. I could have killed him then. My little moment of serenity was shattered and it angered me that he had broken it. But I forced my anger back.
“Aren’t you pretty enough already?” I asked him.
He laughed and made no reply.
“Go on,” Galli called to him. “Have a nice little swim, Thrance! Show us what the Well can do!”
Thrance bowed to her. “Let’s swim in it together, lovely lady.”
There was nervous laughter and some that seemed downright hearty, and even some applause. That astounded me. Each word of this banter was cutting ragged tracks through my soul; and yet my companions seemed amused.
Tension and dread came flowing back into me. I could not believe that I had managed to be so tranquil here, even for a moment or two. This was a hateful perilous place.
“Enough,” I said. “I find this comedy distasteful. We need to move on.” I pointed up toward the place where the cloud layer cut across the sky like an iron band and said, “There’s the Summit, just beyond. Let’s be on our way.”
But no one moved. There was more whispering and a little uneasy giggling. Kilarion pretended to be dragging Naxa toward the edge of the Well, and Naxa pounded his fists on Kilarion’s chest in mock outrage, and Kath made some cheerful silly quip about taking some of the water back to peddle when we returned to Jespodar. I glanced around in astonishment. Had they all lost their minds? Never have I felt so alone as in that moment when I saw how my companions were looking toward the Well. I saw fascination on some faces, a kind of eagerness on others, a playful excitement on still others. The seven little cairns appeared to signify nothing to any of them. Traiben’s eyes were bulging with fierce curiosity. Gazin and Marsiel and two or three others were pondering the Well frowningly, as though in another moment or two they intended to dip themselves in it. Even Hendy seemed tempted. Only Thissa showed any awareness of the dangers that the Well posed, but she too had an odd glitter of speculation in her look.
Pushing and yelling and shoving, I got them all out of there. We went back up the narrow path toward the main trail. Once we were away from the Well its spell seemed to dissipate: there was no more foolish laughter, no more clumsy joking.
Yet we had lost two more of our number to it.
I thought at first that we had lost three; for when I halted to count up, there were just fifteen of us left, and Thrance. One woman was missing—Hilth the Carpenter, I realized—and two men. Which? I called off names. “Kath? Naxa? Ijo?” They were accounted for. Someone said that Gazin the Juggler was not with us. And then it struck me that Traiben was nowhere in sight either.
Gods! Traiben! That was hard to bear. Not caring what the others might say, I turned and ran in frenzy back toward the Well, hoping it might not be too late to pull him free of its deadly waters.
But there he was, trudging cheerfully up the path.
“Poilar?” he said, as I rushed toward him.
I came close to colliding with him and managed to keep from bowling him over only by swerving at the last instant and stumbling up against a boulder that rose beside the trail like a great jagged tooth. The impact knocked the wind out of me and I clung to the rock, wrapping my arms tight around it, until I could breathe again.
Traiben said, “Did you think I had gone in, Poilar?”
“What did you suppose I was thinking?” I asked him furiously.
He smiled. I had never seen him look so disingenuous. “You know I would never have done that. But Gazin did, and Hilth.”
I had half expected that, but the news shook me nevertheless. “What?” I cried. “Where are they?” I saw from Traiben’s face that they had not come out of the Well, that they had used it not for rejuvenation but for obliteration. And then I realized that Traiben must have stood there watching it happen, studying it in that cold-blooded thoughtful way of his, looking on with aloof scholarly interest while a man and a woman to whom he had been bonded by oath were letting their bodies dissolve before his eyes. In that moment a gulf opened between Traiben and me that had not been there before and I was flooded with an immense sadness; and yet I knew that he had always been this way, that there was no reason for me to be surprised.
Together he and I went back to the Well. I envisioned us pulling the diminished bodies out and building two new little cairns over them to go with the other seven; but there was no trace of Gazin and Hilth at all. From the shore we poked in the water with poles that we found nearby, in all likelihood the same ones that my father’s father had used to draw the skeletons of my father and his six companions from the Well. But we found nothing.
I realized then that my father and his friends, though dwindled back to the size of infants, must have changed their minds at the end in some twisting of their tormented souls and tried to come forth from the Well, and had perished on its rim, each one holding another’s hand. But Gazin and Hilth had yielded themselves up completely. I did not even try to understand why. We built cairns in their memory, and then Traiben and I returned to the rest. I told them what had occurred. Later in the day, as we marched along a tongue of rock that seemed to be carrying us straight into empty air, Traiben offered to describe for me the scene he had witnessed. I gave him so terrible a look that he shrank away from me, and it was hours before he would come near me again.
We were into the fog zone now. It lay all about us like a thick woolen cloak, and we walked as though we were traveling ever deeper into a dream.
This was the end of all our striving, the last stage of our long journey. We all knew it; and no one spoke, no one violated the sanctity of the moment. Indeed we were as calm as dead men as we made our way up the final fang of the great mountain.
Behind us everything was white. Nothing could be seen. We were at the roof of the World and perhaps part of the way into the vault of the Heavens, and all that we had traveled through had vanished as though it no longer existed.
We could see nothing ahead, either. Nor was there any visibility to right or left. For all we knew we were moving along an upthrust strip of rock no wider than our two feet, with fathomless abysses on either side. We might even have been walking on nothing but air, following a path that traveled in the midst of utter nothingness. It did not matter. Nothing did. This was journey’s end. In single file we went steadily forward. Thissa led the way, now, for in this ultimate realm, where we were all of us as good as blind, her santha-nilla powers were our only guidance. I walked behind her and Hendy behind me, and then Traiben. In what order the others followed I could not say, for they were invisible to me; but I think that Thrance must have been the last in line, capering along well behind the rest, since that was often his style when he did not choose to run far ahead of everyone.