Beguilers (12 page)

I returned to the hut and continued on in the opposite direction, hoping that the conditions might be easier. But it was the same story that way: deep, unpredictable drifts and the ever-present danger of collapsing cornices. I was making no headway at all, and eventually, tired and dispirited, I made my way back to the hut.

Already it was beginning to feel like home. It occurred to me that Shirsha might be wrong, or that Dabbo might have lied to her. Perhaps he had never been to the cloud mountain at all? Perhaps he had found his beguiler somewhere else, and had merely made up the story about going to the cloud mountain in an effort to get it back?

But if so, why had he spent so much time here, gazing out of this window? Of that much, at least, I had no doubt. It was well known that he had spent most of each year away from the village, and the drawings proved that he had been here. What kind of life had he led? What had been in his mind all that time?

I looked out at the mountain. There was nothing solid in its shifting mists, but there were suggestions of shapes in it. I could see how Dabbo could have become obsessed with trying to discern the nature of it, and how his drawings were his own way of trying to express the substance that he somehow felt must be there. But was he right? Or was his vigil a product of his insanity; a waste of an exiled life?

There was no more that I could do that day. I stayed at the window, watching the cloud mountain. When the sun began to set, it sent shafts of pink and gold, which glinted off something in the vapours, as though there were particles of glass floating around in there. Later, when darkness fell, the clouds reminded me of a pool which has had ink poured into it. Patches of blackness swirled and spread through the milky haze, reminding me of the spirals on Dabbo’s drawings. Later still, when the moon rose, specks of silver and white danced across the shadowy surface, like skaters darting after nippers on a pond.

I was still there watching when the moon completed its arc across the night sky, and although it wasn’t dawn yet, I realised that I had been standing there for hours. I turned away. I knew by now that there was nothing special about me. Shirsha’s beguiler had already taught me that I had no particular immunity to the dangerous fascination these unknown creatures exerted. And I had no more desire to become like Dabbo than I had to become like Shirsha. I needed to be careful; to avoid their mistakes and ensure that I didn’t perpetuate them in my own life. As I wrapped myself up in the shawl for the night, I resolved not to stare at the cloud mountain again.

H
AVING A ROOF OVER
my head gave me a sense of security, and I slept well past dawn and on into the late morning. When I woke I didn’t get up but lay wondering what on earth I was going to do next.

The edges of the crater were too dangerous to walk around; of that much I was certain. The only other way of getting down that I could imagine was by somehow lowering myself on a rope. Had Dabbo done that? Had he even left ropes there, perhaps? Dangling beneath the hut?

I got up and leaned out of the window. The perpendicular drop made me feel dizzy. There was no rope. Even if there had been, I knew that I wouldn’t have been able to trust it after so long. What was more, no rope I had ever seen would be long enough to reach all the way down to the crater floor so far below, and even if one could be found or made, I doubted that I would have the confidence to trust it over such a distance.

Even as I was thinking, my eyes had become glued to the cloud mountain again and I moved away from the window. Sitting around in the hut was going to do me no good at all. I would have to think of something else to do.

I wrapped the shawl around me and went over to the door. Something was moving on the other side of the valley, near where I had left the porters’ path. I screwed up my eyes and stared hard, hoping for a sight of a rare snowbuck or an even rarer orgwal, but the snowfields that lay between were so bright that I couldn’t see what it was. Then a wisp of cloud moved momentarily across the sun and the snow fell into shade. It didn’t last long, but it was long enough for me to get a clear view. What I was watching wasn’t a rare mountain creature, but a chuffie.

My brain seemed to stretch inside my head, as the realisation came to me of what the chuffie’s presence there meant. If it was true that they came to the cloud mountain to die, then all I had to do was follow, and I would surely be led by a passable route. I snatched up a couple of jubs and crammed them into my pocket, then set out across the valley on a trajectory that I hoped would intersect the chuffie’s route.

It was hard going, with deep snow and rocky outcrops causing me to make all kinds of loops and zig-zags and backtracks. Once I fell into a drift that swallowed me whole and I had to dig my way out. I became frantic with impatience, fearful of losing sight of the chuffie, but I needn’t have worried. The closer I got, the slower the poor old creature seemed to be moving.

But when it saw me, the chuffie acted in a way that I had never seen before. It appeared to become agitated; it turned this way and that in the snow, as though it were looking for a bolt-hole or an escape route. When it failed to find any, it went on, a bit faster than before and without looking at me. It isn’t in a chuffie’s nature to reject any kind of human companionship, but I was in no doubt at all that I was being given a strong hint.

I didn’t take it, though. I didn’t even consider turning back. Within another few strides I was in the chuffie’s tracks and gaining on it fast.

It clearly wasn’t the first of its kind to have come this way. Even since the last snowfall a large number of tracks had been made. If I had come across them without seeing the solitary individual, I might have come to the conclusion that a whole herd of chuffies had come that way. But now I understood that this was a regular pathway, one that, for some reason, each chuffie instinctively followed when it sensed that it was nearing its end.

As I caught up with it, the chuffie turned to me with a mournful expression and I was surprised and saddened to discover that I knew her. It was Hemmy’s old chuffie; the one who had been nurturing her so carefully in the days before I left the village. It had been apparent even then that she was near the end. Now it was painfully clear. Her eyes had become dull and had shrunk far back into her skull. Every movement she made seemed to cause her a colossal effort, and I wondered whether she was even going to make it as far as her destination.

I drew alongside her. She didn’t stop. I stroked her wiry coat and spoke softly to her. It seemed wrong to me that she should have to make such an arduous and lonely journey at that hour of her life. She ought to have been given a warm bed beside Hemmy’s fire and allowed to drift quietly into the beyond. But for chuffies, things didn’t happen that way. It wasn’t that the villagers were mean. Most of them would gladly have allowed an elderly creature like this one to retire and live out her days in comfort and security. But it seemed that the chuffies didn’t want that. One day they would be there, getting on with their emotional duties as usual, and the next, with no warning at all, they would be gone. They were rarely seen on their final journey, but porters occasionally brought reports of having seen them in the distance, making their way across the snows. No one, to my knowledge, had ever tried to follow one. Except Dabbo, perhaps.

There was an edge of pleading in the chuffie’s voice as she spoke. I had never heard anything like it before.

‘Osgaggy iffygong,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry,’ I answered. She was being polite, but I knew she was afraid that I would drain her meagre resources and prevent her reaching her resting place. Even though I didn’t feel particularly sad, I was aware that she was interacting with me, disentangling my cluttered emotions. Neither of us wanted it to happen, but neither of us could prevent it. It was just what happened when chuffies and people came into contact.

‘Wimdlety shoffasagus olbappy,’ she said.

‘I just want to follow you,’ I said. ‘I want to go to the cloud mountain.’

‘Babadiddy werraduff.’

‘Why? Why is it a bad place for people?’

But if the chuffie knew the answer she was either too tired or too irritated by my presence to answer.

‘Arglespik ink welgry poon.’

It was the strongest language I had ever heard from a chuffie. It was still polite, in its way, but it left me in no doubt that the cloud mountain was nothing to do with me or my kind, and that everyone, particularly the old chuffie, would be much happier if I turned round and went in the other direction. But I couldn’t.

‘I can’t find the way on my own,’ I said. ‘But I’ll keep my distance. You don’t have to be bothered by me.’

The chuffie said nothing but gave me a long look accompanied by a long sigh. It was strange, but already it seemed to me that her eyes were losing their habitual cheerfulness and beginning to reflect the long years of anguish that she had absorbed from old Hemmy. I wished there was something I could do to help. It pained me to think of her walking towards her death that way, but my sorrow wasn’t going to do anything to help her. Quite the opposite.

I gestured with my arm to send her on her way; anything to put distance between us. She seemed to be moving more slowly and stiffly than ever, but she was, at least, moving. I waited until she had gone twenty or thirty yards ahead of me, then I began to follow.

I needn’t have gone with her at all. Her tracks, and those of all the other chuffies before her, were as easy to follow as the main street of our village. But I felt less alone when she was there, and although I kept a respectful distance behind her for the rest of the way, I did my best not to let her out of my sight.

She led me across the snows and through another deep gorge which was angling, as far as I could tell, towards the crater. When she came to the end of it, she turned to her left around a sharp crag and I lost sight of her for the first time. When I got to the corner I saw her again. She was just beginning to descend into a steep-sided gully, and as I got nearer I saw that it was a rift in the crater wall. It was long and deep, but its neck, where the chuffie had entered it, created an easy, gradual decline. I hesitated for a moment, watching the chuffie make her awkward way down towards the gully floor. The snows ended about halfway down it. When I looked along to the end I could just make out the widening beyond it where the floor of the crater began. Further still, a long way off, lay the cloud mountain.

There was nothing stopping me now. I had jub nuts to eat along the way, and there was plenty of snow around if I was thirsty. But a nagging voice kept trying to intrude upon my thoughts, telling me to go back to the hut and come again another day. I listened to it for quite a while, trying to come up with excuses for following its advice. But there were none. Against all my expectations I had been guided to the cloud mountain, and there was no reason now for not continuing.

It took more than an hour, at the chuffie’s ponderous pace, to walk down into the gully. Water ran down from the melting snows, and for the last half mile of the descent I found myself splashing through a mountain stream. But the water was sweet and refreshing, and the temperature rose as I descended and, on any other day, with any other kind of errand ahead of me, the walk would have been pleasant enough. When I got to the bottom I stopped for a while, waiting again for the chuffie to get well ahead. Then I got up and followed.

The gully was about a mile long, and well before I got to the end of it I began to get a clear view of the cloud mountain. I could see its snowy fringes and the swirling mists rising out of them, towering above me now that I was so much lower down. When I thought too much about what lay ahead of me, about Dabbo and his madness, and his fear of returning to the place that clearly fascinated him above all else, my knees grew weak and I had to concentrate on the simple matter of putting one foot in front of the other. There was no sense in thinking about it. I had taken all the decisions already. All that remained was for me to actually do it.

The mountain loomed over me as I came out of the gully and on to the floor of the crater. The place was colossal, its curving walls spreading for miles in either direction. The chuffie, still struggling on ahead of me, looked tiny in the vast arena and I knew that I was tiny as well, and powerless in the face of the mystery which lay ahead. But I walked on, one foot in front of the other, covering the ground slowly but surely.

I hadn’t worked out how long it would take me to get there. On my own, walking at a decent pace, it might have taken two or three hours. But at the chuffie’s plodding pace it took a lot longer than that. I became aware that I might not have time to get back to the hut before nightfall and the possibility bothered me. But I was too far gone to turn back now, and my feet seemed to be working with a will of their own.

The closer I got to the cloud mountain, the more of my vision it consumed. From time to time I had to stop and look back, to adjust my eyes again to the solid and comforting contours of the crater walls, because the mists were beginning to mesmerise me again now that I had little choice but to look at them. Several times I took stock on my position, only to discover that I had covered far more distance than I had thought. The last time I stopped to look around I noticed that the chuffie had arrived at the edge of the mists and that her form was beginning to grow shadowy as she moved inside. I hurried after her, suddenly needing to be close to some other living thing and not to go blindly wandering in on my own. But I stopped short before I caught up with her. Without even noticing it, I had reached the first white edges of the mountain. What I had taken to be snow wasn’t snow at all. It was bones. Piles and piles of bleached, white bones.

T
HERE’S A LOT THAT
I don’t understand about what happened on the cloud mountain. The first thing is how I came to go on and not turn back. I know that the shock of discovering those bones filled me with terror, and I made an immediate decision to get out of there as quickly as I could. I don’t know whether what happened next was a trick of the mountain itself or of my mind. All I do know is that I didn’t get out. I went on.