"Between two smoking mountains Du shows his face at evening over a lake of fire—"
Ahead, however, there were only fiery mountains and the eternal smokes. He squatted to rest, chewed on a cane. Which two mountains?
There were many, spaced so closely together that their rolling, fiery belchings blended into one sea of molten rock. As for Du, he was not to be seen through the thick smokes.
He slept. It was a warm, secure sleep. Nothing lived there in that acrid, heated, smoked, steamy barren other than Duwan the Drinker. He awoke with Du high in the northern sky and began to make his way across the saddle between two mountains, moving always toward the east, quartering the slope, nearing the stream of molten rock that moved sluggishly down from the peak. It took a long time, for the rocks were jagged, sometimes needle sharp. By evening he was feeling the hot breath of the molten rock on his skin, and then, as if by a miracle, the smoke cleared for a moment and there was Du, shining redly between two distant, smoking mountains. Beneath the kind face of the source glimmered a huge lake of fire.
Encouraged, he moved forward to see that the mountain's face was broken, that the stream of molten rock poured thickly and redly into a fissure. Below that fissure he was able to leap across a chasm at the bottom of which glowed the fires and now the rocks began to burn his feet, so he put on a pair of the sandals and ran toward the last sight of Du, the sandals smoking as they absorbed the heat of the stones.
He seemed to fly down the slope, taking huge strides, his lungs pumping, for he had long since used up the energy stores from the source. Ahead he saw white, dense smoke and slowed his pace, but the smoke was soft to his nose. Steam. A hot spring poured out of the side of the mountain. Although the water boiled and steamed, it cooled on contact with the air and was rich, tasty. He drank and rested. His sandals were burned all the way through. So far, it was exactly as his grandmother had said. He put on the second pair of sandals and ran until his way was blocked by a lake of fire, his skin shriveling under the impact of the fierce heat. He turned to the west, climbed a slope, and, on the last remaining layers of the sandals left the smoking, hot ground for a field of smooth ash that gradually hardened until he was walking on a rippled, hard surface warmed but not heated to painful intensity. The way to the south was open before him, only emptiness in the distance.
Once he stopped to look back at the land of eternal fires, the natural barrier that protected his valley from any enemy. Forbidding as the barrens over which he was marching were, the landscape to the north was far more terrible. For the first time in his life he could appreciate the courage, or the desperation, of the Great Alon and the ones who followed him. Had he, himself, been leading, not knowing what lay beyond those fiery, shaking, smoking mountains, he would never have mustered the determination necessary to enter that zone of fire. But then, he added, to himself, he didn't have the Enemy at his rear with sword and arrow and spear.
He had been on the march for enough circles of Du to make up a time of long light, and he had traveled far, and, to judge from the landscape of barren rock around him, he might as well have stayed near the valley. Only the attitude of Du in the sky had changed, the source now remaining below the zenith even in the morning, sinking out of sight below the southern horizon off to the west in the middle of the marching period. He counted the dim and darks, but, not having the knowledge nor the talent of Manoo the Predictor, he could not relate those odd activities of Du to real time, so that he was not only lost in a barren, endless desert of cooling rock, he was lost in his sense of time. Only that natural ability, that sense of attraction in his very blood, made it possible for him to continue ever southward, never deviating from that line except to skirt impassable features of the land. It was always there, and he did not even have to think to know when he had his back directly to the north. The standard valley day was measured by one full circle of Du during the time of the long light. He estimated that he had traveled for a length of days corresponding to one full period and to the middle days of another period of long light when he first began to know the chill during the times of dimness. Four estimated days after that, he donned dim-time clothing when Du was below the horizon, packed it away when the source came with his heat. Then, after more estimated days, Du was performing in an odd fashion, ducking below the southwestern horizon to reappear on the southeastern horizon in glory. He was beginning to be concerned, for his grandmother had said that he would be in a land of snows while Du was long. Nor had he seen any brothers, scattered or otherwise. Not even the smallest brothers were to be found growing on the warmed surface of the rocks.
He had no alternative. He pushed southward, running now, even though he was thin, honed to a fine tenseness of form. He ran in the light of Du and he ran in the dims, which became darks as the distance behind him lengthened and lengthened and then, after running through a dark, he saw, with Du's first rays, a dull green sheen on a rock ahead. Tiny brothers grew there, and he shared their life, careful not to disrupt their colony. There was new strength in him, although he needed water badly. On another morning he saw in the distance a spike of green and there was a small brother, so he knew that he was nearing a zone of life. He used the emergency water supply then, drinking it in one long, satisfying draft from the shell of the nut brother. Soon he was moving through a landscape of scattered soil pockets and scattered, small brothers, and still there was no snow.
He rested, and slept long, and woke with pain in every joint, the pain of cold. A heaviness was atop him. He tried to move and panic grew in him when he opened his eyes to see nothing, only an impenetrable blackness, and he was cold, so cold. Every movement was an effort. He shook, lifted his arms and legs against resistance, and then, with a scream of sheer terror of the unknown, he bunched his energies and exploded upward from under a fresh blanket of snow that had covered him during the night. As far as he could see there was that deadly whiteness, but, when he had begun to move, trudging through a smooth, even snowfall that came halfway to his knees, his blood flowed and his cells were not ruptured by the ice and he knew that the cold was not a killing cold, as long as he kept moving.
There was food now. It was dry, tough, cold period fodder, but it was full of energy and the snow satisfied his need for water. He moved swiftly into a land of more and more brothers of one type, tall, thin, cold-resistant brothers who dropped dead limbs in profusion, making it easy for him to have a warm fire when he rested.
Never had he seen such darks as he saw when he entered a forest of tall brothers so dense that the glow of the sky's night fires, a newness to him, were hidden by the overlapped boughs. And the darks were long, and cold, and he had to travel through them, sleeping little, not daring to rest, for the cold was on his heels now, as he'd been warned, and to sleep long meant death.