One of the things that he saw most clearly was that it would be easy to underestimate most of the people he was now with. Not Rukh, and not Child-of-God - each of whom radiated power like hot coals inches from the palm of a hand. But most of the rest were so limited in their view of the universe, so steeped in their religious beliefs, and in many ways so unquestioning as to be hardly suspected even of shrewdness.
But there was more to each one of them than those limitations implied. They were, in fact, very like these mountains through which they now trudged, committed to a conflict they did not really understand but which they would pursue while any flicker of life was still in them, in the name of what they believed to be right.
Deep down, there was a great strength in each of them; an innate strength and a search toward something of more meaning than mere survival. This difference in them from the miners of Coby had reawakened Hal to the reasons and purpose his own life should have. He found himself thinking of where he would need to go from this present moment, to what end he should be looking, and planning to meet.
Somewhere in the last few weeks, he had hardened into the resolve to meet the Others head-on as soon as he should be strong enough. Among the complex bundle of attitudes that made him what he was, was one reflex that looked back always to the moment in which Malachi, Obadiah and Walter had died on the terrace; and a feeling, hard and ancient and unsparing, looked also toward Bleys and Dahno and all their kind. But beyond that he felt, without the understanding that would enable him to define it, that oceanic purpose that had always been there behind everything else in him, now developing into something like a powerful commitment only waiting for the hour in which it would be called to action.
Because he could not define it, because it evaded his grasp when he tried to get his mind around it, he drifted off into the area of poetic images which had always acted as translator for him of those things which his conscious mind could not grasp. As he had used his memories of Walter, Obadiah and Malachi in the Final Encyclopedia to give form to his problem of escape from the Others, so he found himself coming to use the making of poetry to reach the formless images and conclusions in the back of his mind.
As he tramped along, he cut the creative part of himself loose to the great winds of awareness that blew invisibly behind all thoughts; and, line by line as he walked behind the donkeys through the bright-cold of the high mountains, he found himself beginning to reach out and build a poem that put a form and a language to that awareness. Line by line it grew; and just before one of the midday halts, it was done.
No one is so plastic-fine
That he lacks a brown man.
Twisted core of the old-wood roots,
In blind earth moving.
Clever folk with hands of steel
Have built us to a high tower,
Pitched far up from the lonely grass
And the mute stone's crying.
Only, when some more wily fist
Shatters that tower uplifted,
We may yet last in the stone and grass
By a brown man's holding.
The poem sang itself in his head like a repeated melody. It was a song, he thought reasonlessly, to eat up the distance between him and the dark tower of his dream.
With that thought, a vagrant idea came to him of another possible poem waiting to be born about the dark tower of his dream - a poem that charted the path into a new and larger arena of possibilities that was waiting in the back of his mind, somewhere. But it slipped away as he reached for it now. Like his song about the brown man, it bore a relationship to himself and his circumstances in ways he could feel but not yet define. Only, the poem about the tower was massive and touched great forces waiting to be. He forced himself to put aside thinking of it and came back to the brown man song to see what it had to tell him.
Clearly, it was saying that a stage was now past for him, a step was achieved - before he could think any farther into it, he saw Jason standing by the side of the route, holding the halter of one of the donkeys. Hal shooed his own beasts ahead and drew level with Jason and his.
"What's up?" he called.
"A thrown shoe," said Jason. "It must have happened right after we started. We'll have to switch the load to another animal."
Chapter Nineteen
The donkeys were divided into two strings, and the one with the thrown shoe was the first of Jason's string. The path they had been following along the mountain slope was only wide enough for one animal in some places and the whole string was blocked from moving farther until that beast was out of the line.
"Howard, can you take her back?" Jason said. "I can hold the rest."
Hal came up and began the job of coaxing the donkey off the solid surface of the trail onto the loose rock of the hillside beneath it, so that she could be turned around and led to the rear.
They were moving through a pass in the mountains along the flank of a steep slope, following a path that evidently had not been used since the fall before. It was covered with a winter's debris; twigs and needles and cones from the imported variform conifers that had come to clothe these high-altitude slopes in the temperate zones of Harmony. But it was a route that looked as if it had existed during some years for use in good weather. It took advantage of natural flat areas along the way, winding up and down as it went, but trending always southward.
Below the solid and flat surface of the narrow path, the gray-brown treeless slope pitched sharply downward for over three hundred meters to a cliff-edge and a vertical drop of as much again to a mountain river, hidden far below. Above the path, the slope became less steep and was consequently treed - sparsely, but enough so that, fifty meters up, vegetation blocked the eye completely from a view of a short stretch of higher horizontal ridge that had been paralleling the path for the last several hundred meters.
At the moment, Rukh's Command was following the outward swell of the mountain's breast. Ahead of Hal and Jason, the slowly-moving line of people disappeared from sight around the curve of it, to their left. Behind them Hal, as he got the donkey turned, could see back for several kilometers of open mountainside, past a vertical fold in the rock that made a dozen-meters-wide indentation where they had just passed, an indentation that narrowed sharply upward until it became first a cleft, then a narrow chimney, rising to the stony surface of the ridge above. Behind them, also, there were fewer trees and the full slope of the mountainside up to the treed ridge above lay open to the eye. The air was dry and clear, so that distances looked less than they actually were, under a sky with only a few swift-moving, small clouds.
"So… so…" soothed Hal, conning the donkey over the loose shale below the path to a point behind the other animals, where he could lead her back up on to it. He reached that point and got her up, turning to find that Jason had ground-hitched the next donkey in line behind the one just taken out. The whole back half of that particular string was now waiting patiently, and Jason was scrambling rapidly along the shale to join him.
"We can put Delilah back in, to replace her - " Jason began as he reached the path beside Hal - and the air was suddenly full of whistlings.
"Down!" shouted Hal, dragging the other man flat on the mountainside below the lip of the path. Sharp-edged pieces of the loose rock that covered the slope stabbed at Hal through his shirt and slacks. Up on the path, several of the loaded donkeys were staggering down onto the slope, or slowly folding at the knees to lie huddled on the path. The whistling ceased, and the abrupt silence was shocking.