Paulo, the three Singlars, and I set out early the next day, heading away from the Tower City in the direction Corionus had named Primary, approximately opposite the moon-door - the passage to Valleor. The stacks of stone and wood said it didn’t actually matter a whit which way we went, as the Edge was about the same distance from the City in every direction. But it made sense to see something new along the way.
Unfortunately, for half the day a steady, cold rain kept us from seeing anything more than twenty paces from the track, only the flat ghostly outlines telling us when we passed a cluster of towers. After six or eight soggy hours of walking, Zanore stopped at the top of a small rise and peered steadily into the gloom ahead before directing us to the left, in the first obvious deviation from our straight-line course. Zanore’s amber eyes must have seen more ahead than human ones could. Neither Paulo nor I could see anything that wasn’t gray or wet or immediately under our feet, and thus no reason to turn aside.
“Danger to pass through here,” said Zanore, when I asked him why we were going out of our way. “Strange tales have I heard of this place. Best stay away.”
“What kind of tales?”
The three conferred among themselves and couldn’t come up with anything but the words hurtful and troubled.
“If you’ve no better explanation than that, we’ll go straight,” I said. “I want to get to the Edge today, and I don’t think we’ll want to spend the night there. I won’t let anything happen to us.” Except for the firestorms, I’d seen nothing of the Bounded or its inhabitants that we couldn’t deal with. I felt safer here than at Verdillon.
The three were afraid to argue, so with many sighs and muttering and shaking of heads, they led us on the downward path and into a wide, rocky gully, where we found ourselves ankle-deep in mud. We soon glimpsed a cluster of perhaps fifty or sixty dreary fastnesses, low, crude things of rocks and mud, none better than the others.
The Singlars who stepped out of the rock piles were mostly naked, all of them thinner than Zanore. If they’d not smiled cheerfully and bowed at our passing, I might have thought them standing corpses from some long finished battle. One of the Singlars stepped forward with his hands raised over his head and spread wide apart - in greeting it appeared - offering the same welcome shown me by all the Singlars, without the speechless groveling that usually accompanied it.
“Greetings, weary traveler. Such happiness you bring to our valley.” The spokesman was a tall, emaciated man with dark skin and a twisted back that left one shoulder higher than the other. He wore nothing but a tattered loin wrapping, yet his shaggy black hair was clean and tied back with a piece of vine, and his air of dignity would not have been out of place in any fine house. His protruding bones vibrated with the rumbling of his voice. “Too rare is our delight in seeing new faces. Will you stop for a while?”
“No, no, no, no,” whispered Vroon, pawing at my arm. “We travel in haste. No stoppings.”
A smile radiated like sunlight from the man’s huge, pale eyes. “To hear a word from the world beyond our fastness would be a joy unmatched. So empty is our experience of travelers; I must think that you are someone of importance, someone who has much to share with us. If we could persuade you to share a dry seat, a morsel, and a sip, you might, in that brief time, provide us a feasting of words to last until the Bounded grows ancient.”
There was no danger here. I could snap this man like a twig.
“Of course, we’ll stay,” I said, dismissing Vroon’s urgent gesturing without a second thought. I’d not heard a Singlar so well-spoken, nor so cheerful and mannerly in his greeting. Besides, I was ravenously hungry, and even the prospect of a Singlar’s unvarying menu of tappa root had my stomach growling.
The man clapped his hands in delight. “My fastness awaits. If your companions wish to come, we will be crowded, but happy. Others will bring sustenance for them.”
I glanced at Vroon and he shook his head. “Out here we’ll stay waiting, if you insist on going inside, my - ”
“I insist.” I interrupted him before he could come out with some honorific that might make my host less at ease.
Paulo came inside with me, but Ob, Vroon, and Zanore stubbornly remained standing in the rain.
The Singlar’s dim and smoky shelter was the most barren I had seen, its rock-and-mud walls unrelieved by any decoration, its furnishings no more than two smooth rocks beside a tiny fire pit scraped in the center of the dirt floor. A small heap of dark, spongy squares sat to one side, their purpose revealed when the tall man set one in the fire pit and carefully blew a small ember to life underneath it. In northern Valleor, where wood was scarce, the villagers used such material cut from the ground to make their fires. The fire seemed hardly enough to warm the Singlar, much less dry out two such soggy guests.
“Tell us of the wide world, traveler,” said the man, easing his bent frame onto the ground across the fire from us. “We hunger to know of it.”
“You surely know more than I,” I said. “I’m new to your land and few speak as freely as you to teach me of it.”
He squinted pleasantly. “Hmmm… you’ve not the look of a new-birthed Singlar who wanders from the Edge. You have been real longer than any I’ve known, longer than any who hold fastness here. I see it in your bearing. I hear it in your words. You come from the center of the wide world to which we send the new-birthed on their way, never to see them return. Mayhap even farther than that.”
“Perhaps you could tell me of your life here and what you know of the wide world, then I can tell you whatever new I can.”
The man laughed and flushed a little. “I’ve given these Singlars so many guesses, told so many stories of what I imagine or surmise, I can hardly say what is fact and what is only my foolishness. You must catch me up where I err.”
While he emptied a small lump of tappa root from a woven bag, sliced it thin with a stone knife, and fried it in a chipped clay pot over his little fire, he told me of storms that lashed their valley, and earthquakes and lightnings from the Edge. His villagers welcomed the occasional wanderer who struggled in from the Edge naked and bewildered, and they tried to calm those who arrived frightened and ferocious. Often they had to fight off raving man-beasts who roamed the wilds and were known to kill Singlars and eat them. The Guardian had forbidden the rift dwellers to leave their valley, but they were determined to make the best of it until the king came to the Bounded to change everything.
His stories, though interesting and dramatic, fit with what I knew already. It was only when I asked him about his knowledge and theories of the “wide world” that I heard anything extraordinary.
“Have you not wondered about the Bounded?” he asked, leaning toward me, his eyes alight. “I sit before my fastness and watch the passing of the storms and feel the earth shaking under my feet; I see the new-birthed Singlars open their eyes to the world, and my head will not stop wondering.”
“And what have you concluded?”
The man almost whispered his answer, as if these wonders of his reason were too much to express. “Our land is alive. We feel the beating of her heart, and we experience the pain of her growth. She is bent in her aspect as are we, and it pains her as do our own misshapen parts. Our life here is hard. But I tell my people that the Bounded is only just learning of Singlars, and that we are hidden here in our valley where she cannot see us as yet. When she learns of our hardships, she will share her abundance and shepherd us through the storms.”
As he talked of his strange theories, I ate his fried tappa as if I’d not eaten in a week. I would have eaten five times as much if it had been available. Paulo left his share to me, saying it was clear I was far hungrier than he, and our host shook his head when I indicated he should take his own portion.