Beguilers (11 page)

I was thirsty as well, and the few drops of water still in my skin were old and stale. Now that the sun was up I could clearly see the channel of a small but swift stream that was running directly down from the melting snows. I tied up my shawl and made my way over to it, then drank my fill with the clearest heart I had known for many days.

The nearest patch of snow was no more than a few yards away, and when I had refilled my skin I walked up to it to mark, in some symbolic way, my arrival at the next stage of my journey. When I drew near to it I saw that it was more like ice than snow; it must have almost melted and been refrozen many times, and was full of black grit. I was slightly disappointed. One of my favourite things about the first of each year’s snows is to take a big fistful and chew it, remembering the pure taste of it from the last year and the year before. There was no question of eating this, but as I looked up towards the pass where I would soon be travelling I knew that if snow was what I wanted I would soon have more than enough of it. And at the same time I realised that I was wasting time. A strong porter with good boots could cross the pass unloaded between dawn and dusk, but I doubted that I could. I would need to plan on at least half that amount of time again. That would mean that if I set out now, I would be aiming to reach the opposite snow-line at some stage during the following night. It would be a long, hard walk, but I had no alternative. To stop and sleep in the snows would mean death for someone without a tent or a proper bedroll. I took a bite out of my whisker-fruit and set off towards the path.

I hadn’t walked far when I realised that I was not alone. One of the chuffies had detached herself from the wandering band and appointed herself to be my companion. She was so small and so furry that I could hardly see her short little legs, and she seemed to be gliding across the stony ground at my heels.

I stopped and crouched down beside her. She stood on her hind legs and pushed her warm nose into my face, ecstatic at having been noticed at last.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I can’t take you with me.’

In other circumstances I could think of nothing more delightful than to have this happy, bumbling clown accompany me across the pass. But what could I do? Already my eyes were beginning to itch and sting and my lungs echoed a wheezy reminder of the previous night’s discomfort.

‘Karumph wither snoggle,’ said the cub.

‘But I can’t,’ I replied. ‘I can’t take anyone.’

‘Hickle tarbedis!’ she said.

‘I know that’s true of most people, but I can. I can manage on my own.’

‘Affle dandero?’

‘Of course I like you. You’re wonderful. But you …’

She was looking at me apprehensively, wondering what her failings were. I felt like a disapproving parent.

‘It’s not your fault,’ I said. ‘It’s mine. I have an allergy to you, to all chuffies. You make me sneeze and wheeze.’

She was so disappointed that I felt sorry for her, which was the worst thing I could possibly have done. My sadness attached her to me more securely than any leash and she glued herself against my knees, feeding off my emotions like a child at its mother’s breast.

I tried to push her away but it made me feel worse, and the worse I felt the more tightly she clung to my side. It was an impossible situation.

‘No.’ I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was doing what Shirsha had advised me to do with the beguilers. The only way out of the situation for me was to shut down my feelings. I hated it, but I did it, pushing the emotions down and closing a mental door behind them. The chuffie shrank away as though it had been struck. A trickle of regret escaped my barriers and she turned back hopefully, but I tightened the seal and turned away. While I could, I began to walk up the well-worn track, and I didn’t look back until I reached a sharp bend, several hundred yards further on.

The chuffie was nowhere to be seen. I was alone again.

The heat was surprisingly strong despite the altitude, but I made good progress and soon found myself in the company of the white peaks, walking along the packed snow of the trade path. Twice that day I encountered porters; one group carrying rice towards the coastal settlements, the other returning with tapestries and silver. They all had tents and must have camped high on the pass, stopping at dusk as was the custom and not emerging until dawn when the danger of beguilers had passed.

When I saw the first group approaching me I hailed them heartily and waved, but to my consternation they stopped dead on the track and looked at me fearfully. I continued to approach and, as I did so, they moved forward again, their looks turning from fear to scorn. Many of the faces were familiar to me since porters travelling that route often stop off for a night in our village. But although I tried to catch the eyes of those I knew, they wouldn’t look at me. Nor did they speak to me at all. After they had gone I tried to brush off the experience; told myself that it was their problem not mine. But despite myself it bothered me, and made me feel hollow and alone. When I saw the second group coming towards me I stayed quiet until they had drawn near enough for me to recognise the individual faces, then I called in as friendly a manner as I could. But their reaction was the same; fear giving way to haughty disdain.

I had forgone my chance of returning to the village and was an outcast again. I found myself thinking about Marik, and an image of his strange, dreamy gaze came into my mind. Why had he encouraged me to go on? How was it that he could accept me for what I was when others couldn’t?

Maybe I was just a gullible fool. Maybe he was laughing at me now, spending the money from my jubs, buying drinks for all his companions. A dark tide of bitterness rose up under my breastbone, but before it engulfed me a question came into my mind; a question that I had once asked him and ought to have asked again. Why was he not afraid of the beguilers? Why did he sleep outside the tents when everyone else huddled inside in fear?

I had no answer, but the thoughts comforted me nonetheless. Marik and I had something in common. Whatever his reasons he, like me, was unafraid of the night. That fact alone created a bond between us, and although the puzzle continued to nag at me, I decided to trust him. And in the long lonely hours that followed, that simple decision helped me to sustain my spirit.

T
HE VAST WHITENESS OF
the snow was more disorientating than darkness. Broken snakes danced across my vision, never still, maddening in their evasiveness, and from time to time I lost my sight altogether and had to stop and rest until it returned. It was easier to fix my eyes on my feet and I became quite mesmerised by their fluid, monotonous action, which seemed to continue quite independently of my will.

It was nearly dark before I realised that night was falling. The white mountainside reflected all available light so perfectly that I never found it difficult to see the path, even during the darkest time before the moon rose. It was cooler, though, and I made a decision to stop and take a decent rest to refresh myself before it grew colder still and forced me to keep moving.

There was no wind up there that night, and no wild-life of any kind. It was the total, white silence after I had eaten that drove me to my feet again and got me on the move. The crisp sound of my footsteps was reassuring and I relaxed into a sort of hypnotic rhythm, one foot in front of the other. Before long the ground levelled out, and although I expected it to rise again, it didn’t, but began to fall away in luxurious descent. Soon afterwards the track dipped down and joined a glacial valley with high, craggy walls. Previous travellers had erected poles or cairns of stones to mark fissures in the ice which ran beneath the snow. The cloud mountain was out of sight behind the closer peaks, which was just as well because I needed all my attention to make sure I didn’t leave the path by mistake and end up at the bottom of a crevasse.

Besides that, descending had brought new problems with it. My boots were well-made but I was the last in a succession of owners, and their soles were badly worn. I was inclined to slip easily, so I had to walk with a curious bent-kneed posture which kept my weight steady. It meant that instead of going faster on the way down, I went more slowly, and I was glad when the wide expanse of the glacier began to be broken up by the boulders of the moraine below.

The valley swung round to the left, but the path led up to the right through the snows and I followed it. When I reached the top of the col, the sight that met me made me stop in my tracks. The cloud mountain was rearing above me, in full view now, only its base hidden by the jumble of crags and foothills. I had no idea it was so close, and the prospect of reaching it so soon drained the blood from my limbs and made me shiver in the freezing air.

My mind began to race in panic-stricken circles, looking for a way out. A hundred and one excuses offered themselves to me. My jub trees beckoned, and I might have succumbed to their comforting promises if I hadn’t caught sight of something unexpected; something quite out of place in that bleak and windswept place.

At the top of a craggy slope, unmistakable in its stark solitude, was the stone hut that Dabbo had drawn. It stood alone, the only man-made object in the wilderness of snow and ice. Although it was still quite a distance away, I could make out that the door stood open, or didn’t exist, and on the far wall the smaller square of a window was allowing the shifting, glinting light of the cloud mountain to show through.

I had to go there. I had to see if Dabbo had left any more clues to his tormented life. But that was all. Whatever I found there, I was under no obligation to go any further. The thoughts reassured me and, wrapping myself tightly in the yellow shawl, I left the path and began to climb towards the crag.

For the first time since I had woken that morning I remembered my dream about being a beguiler high up above the earth. It brought memories of sorrow with it and I tried to evade them, having no chuffies now to rescue me from my feelings. But it seemed as though up here the emotional turmoil I had experienced did not have the same strength. I could remember it and even relive it, but it didn’t have the power to cripple me or to pull me in. I played with the emotions in my heart, feeing the sorrow of the beguilers one minute and the light-hearted cheer of the chuffies the next. They achieved some sort of balance between them and it reminded me of the sense of recognition I had felt when I first looked into the eyes of a beguiler, and their undoubted relationship to the chuffies. I was still puzzling over the mystery when daylight began to replace the bluer light of the moon and brighten the snows again. The night had passed a great deal more easily than I had anticipated.

Travelling through the deep, untrodden snow was slow and exhausting. As soon as the sun was up I found a comfortable rock which gave me a good view of the surroundings. It was still very early, and the heat haze which generally rose from the plains and obscured them from sight had not yet begun to form. The views were so spectacular that for a long time I forgot the reason for my detour, and forgot about breakfast, too. On one side, the folding foothills dropped away in a thousand shades of green towards the muddy blue of the sea. And on the other, impossible to describe in its scintillating mystery, stood the cloud mountain.

Waiting for me.

D
ABBO’S HUT WAS PERCHED
on the very top of the steep crag. I was out of breath when I got there, and paused for a few moments before going in. The door was broken; nothing more than a few rotting boards hanging from rusted hinges. But it must have been strong once, to keep out the tyrannical winds that ruled that area even in the summer.

I was aware that there would be a drop on the other side of the crag, but it wasn’t until I was inside the hut and looking out through the window that I realised the extraordinary geography of that place. The hut seemed to be hanging in mid-air. Beneath it was a sheer cliff, falling for hundreds of feet. I stepped back, dizzied by the sight. When I plucked up the courage to look out again, I saw more. The cliff swung around on both sides in a long, shallow curve. I could see it for miles in each direction, a massive rock wall like the rim of a crater. I couldn’t see the far side, as it was hidden by the shifting vapours, but I had no reason to believe that it didn’t continue all the way round, completely encircling the cloud mountain.

Now I understood Dabbo’s drawings. How many days and weeks and months and years he had stood on that spot I would never know, but it was clear that he had been obsessed by the mountain and had tried in every way he could to know it. The swirls and dots that covered so many pages were his efforts to represent the changing moods of the vaporous mass. What I didn’t know, and couldn’t begin to guess, was what he had encountered there when he went in to find his beguiler, and why he had never again mustered the courage to return.

I rested for a while, huddled on the raised slab that must once have been Dabbo’s bed. There was no sign of any kind of occupancy; no blankets or provisions, no fuel or ashes. He had not been here for more than twelve years, I knew that, but even so I would have expected to find some traces of his existence. It was as though he had never been.

As my body became rested, my mind began to grow active again and I wondered how he had got down the cliff face. I went back to the window and searched left and right along the rock wall, but I couldn’t see any sign of a path. I noticed, that although the bottom of the crater was well below the snow line and strewn with a jumble of grey stones, there appeared to be snow beneath the cloud mountain, shining white all around the shifting, dreaming skirts. It was a strange discovery, but not one that concerned me. And it certainly wouldn’t have been the cold that had prevented Dabbo from returning to it. If he could survive up here in this shack, he could survive anywhere.

I ate a couple of my nuts and set out soon afterwards to explore the rim of the crater, grabbing a handful of snow here and there as I went to slake my thirst. That excursion turned out to be a lot more difficult than I had expected. The snow had been blown into dangerous cornices all along the lip of the crater, and several times I found myself sinking into deep drifts which gave no warning of their existence. The shawl kept me warm, but I was making very little progress, and was aware of the constant danger of wandering too close to the edge and taking an overhanging snow-drift plunging with me to the bottom of the cliff.