Vroon had told me that most of the newcomers had a difficult time learning how to grow their fastnesses, or even how to get in or out of them, much less where and how to harvest the tappa roots. He and his companions felt bad about it, but didn’t know how to remedy the problem. The idea of teaching the poor souls had never occurred to them. At least Tom had learned about tappa.
The fellow smiled, then. “Listen.” Returning the pipe to his lips and propping it up with his handless wrist, he danced his five fingers over the holes.
I was not a judge of music. Though my mother valued it, and I was told she played the flute reasonably well, four years of listening to her had not made up for twelve years’ lack. But Tom’s playing was something else again. The song rambled slowly and mournfully for a while, up and down the scales as if looking for just the right note. There it was, and the next, not the one you might expect, but a different note that took you around an unsuspected corner, and before I knew it, I was somewhere else altogether…
They’re so green… the fair hills of my land. The lake so clear, imaging the bowl of the sky. Or is it the sky what is the deeps of the lake? The sun is blessed hot. Its firm hand feels so fine beating down on my shoulders, and the heather smell floats on the soft air, boiled up from the ground by the sun, Dora says. The sheep are safe, but I’ve got to get back. Pap’ll beat me for leaving the sheepcrook behind. He’s a firmer hand than even the sun. But I’m free with my pipes, and running. Up and across the hills just like the music… faster and faster, then down, down into the cool valley. Pap says the sheep smell tells of the year’s good fortune…
“You see?”
The music had stopped, taking the vision with it. I had. never felt so light, so… joyful. Now, my bodyguard’s bulk close to my elbow seemed to be the only thing that kept me from toppling over.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Paulo. Whispering.
I shook the fragments of the image from my head. “I’m fine.” I almost shivered as I wriggled the fingers of my left hand, reassuring myself that fingers and hand were all there. From the puzzled looks, I gathered that no one else had seen what I’d seen.
Tom smiled at me crookedly. “How could I leave? I never made such music in the hills, and it brings the hills to my heart so’s I don’t sorrow for ‘em too fierce. And these good folk here” - he waved his stump at Vroon and Zanore and the other Singlars - “they don’t make jest of a man if ’e’s a broken one like me. They’re all broken, too. I belong here.”
Someone had dropped a cloak about my shoulders. I hooked the clasp at my throat. “Your music is very nice. Stay as long as you like in the Bounded. Come and tell me if you decide you want to go home.” I hurried out.
From the outside, Tom’s tower was a squat, ugly place, like a mud wasp’s nest attached to a grimy windowsill. I told Vroon I wanted Tom taken care of, taught how to live properly in the Bounded, and the same for all the others that he and Ob and Zanore had brought here. If they wanted to return to their homes, Vroon should take them back through the moon-door.
Then, we headed back for the Blue Tower. I needed to sleep.
As I had expected, they were waiting for me outside the Blue Tower… the Singlars… filling the commard so that I had to pass through them to get inside. They murmured reverently and bent their knees as I passed. I didn’t want this. I didn’t want any of it.
CHAPTER 19
The condition of the Singlars nagged at me. I didn’t understand how the storerooms at the Blue Tower had come to be filled with ham, duck sausage, oranges, and silk, while the Singlars had nothing but tappa, mud, and rock. The answer must exist in the garden. I didn’t trust the Source to tell me anything useful, so I decided to do some investigating, putting the question to the Source only if I couldn’t discover the answer on my own.
“I need to understand about the light,” I said one day, as Paulo and I poked around the base of the cliffs near the waterfall and the amethyst cave. “What makes a light so bright that plants can grow inside this place?” And it was only here. No Singlar I’d spoken to, even among those who had traveled widest, knew of anything like this garden elsewhere in the Bounded.
The pale yellow boulders were jumbled and broken around the waterfall and the grotto, the face of the rock less sheer than the rest of the garden perimeter. Innumerable dirt paths squeezed past the rocks, promising to take you higher, only to taper into nothing or end abruptly at a cliff. I climbed back down from the current dead end.
“This whole world is fair odd. I could believe most anything.” Paulo vanished behind a boulder twice my height, then emerged above it, craning his neck upward and snaking his head. “We might try this way. Looks rugged, though.”
I squeezed between the boulder and the cliff, and scrambled up the rocks to stand beside him. It wasn’t exactly a path. More like a flight of granite steps, sized for legs three times the length of mine, with a number of stomach-curdling gaps filled by loose avalanche debris. We started up. Our path held close enough to the falls to keep the rocks treacherously damp.
A quarter of the way to the top of the falls, Paulo sat heavily on a wide boulder. His exaggerated groan bounced off the rocks as he sprawled on his back and flung his arms wide. “Demonfire, but I’m done already. I’ll just wait here for you to scrape me up on your way down.”
No surprise. The way kept getting steeper. Paulo’s stamina was much improved in the last week, but his hands were still bandaged and weak. I’d already had to haul myself over a few of the slabs.
“If I’m passing by too fast on the way down, you might need to stick out your hand and catch me,” I said, peering up into the glare.
By the time I reached the top of the falls, I was climbing rather than walking or scrambling. The effort required all my limbs and all my concentration. And the heat had become murderous. Only the spray from the falls and the eddying air currents set in motion by the massive movement of water kept me from melting into a heap.
Eventually, the steep cleft in the rock led me over the edge of the cliff. I rested for a while on a gentle slope of barren rock that formed both the cliff top and the riverbank, funneling the water over the edge. Before me lay the gut-heaving drop to the colorful blot of the garden. I couldn’t see the roof or sky or whatever it was existed above this odd landscape. Great billows of steam hung over the river as it thundered over the edge of the cliff, causing a hazy glare that obscured the view. The rock underneath me was hot to the touch.
Not much farther. What I was searching for was nearby. My bones told me. My senses and instincts insisted. After the brief rest, I blotted my damp face one more time on my shirt and climbed up and away from the cliff’s side to see what lay beyond the rocky slope. When I reached the summit, my heart almost stopped.
The ridge sloped sharply downward and flattened into a shimmering plain, the shore of an ocean of fire… a sea of sunlight… a rippling expanse of gold that stretched as far as I could see into the uncertain reaches of this strange place. From this gleaming ocean, pillars of shifting light rose into the heights, some gold, some blue-white, some red-orange, ever growing and dissipating like the watery storms and spouts sailors witnessed on mundane oceans. The hazy brilliance threatened to blind me; the heat came near blistering my skin. To stay here long would leave me no strength to go down again.
This marvel, like the moon-door and the garden and the heaving Edge, was no enchantment, but the natural substance of the Bounded. Looking on it left the same warm, satisfied feeling in my belly as a good meal and good wine.
I was not tempted to touch the substance of the sea itself. To stand even so near as I was to the scalding water… fire… whatever it was… was debilitating enough. Yet neither could I retreat. For the great crescent of shoreline that swept alongside the river, where it flowed out of the sea and across the plain to cool and plummet over the edge of the cliff, was not sand, but shingle, great swathes of fist-sized golden rocks abandoned by the sea and the river.