Beguilers (13 page)

I touched the edges of the mists, or the mists reached out and surrounded me and, very gradually at first, everything began to seem unreal. Colours were at the same time more vivid and more distant, as though I could see them more clearly but could find nothing to touch and hold on to. Then even the substance that had been there seemed to fade out, so that I could no longer feel the shifting bones beneath my feet; I might have been walking through water or air. That’s why I can give no answer when people ask me if there is a mountain beneath the clouds or not. I don’t know. And as I went, or was drawn, further on in, even the questions that had seemed so important lost their meanings and stopped asking themselves. I became part of the mists, part of the dream, and the swirling vapours all around revealed themselves as the raw stuff of existence in which chuffie and human and beguiler natures were all mixed up together and indistinguishable. The milky air glimmered with strange lights, and although their perpetual shirting made it impossible to focus on any of them, I was constantly reminded of the shine of beguilers and of the warm, generous expressions of chuffies. When I stood still and listened, there was total silence in there, but whenever I moved, my mind was full of sounds. As though I breathed them in and made them part of me, the lost souls that drifted in the mists made themselves heard inside my head; I became a receptor for the sighs and moans that they no longer had voices to express.

Still I went on, drawn by something that was outside my control. The cloud mountain was quite still; no wind blew in there, and if there were chuffies moving I never saw them. But the stillness was full of energy, like the tranquil centre of a hurricane. I was part of something that my mind could never grasp or explain, but which my heart understood perfectly.

It happened slowly; so slowly that I was scarcely aware of it. My will departed from me, in thrall to the mystical vapours. Gradually, I found my personality softening, losing its identity, opening to the raw emotions of which the mountain seemed to consist. My attention was entirely dissipated, absorbed by the formless mists.

I don’t know how long I stayed there, in that beautiful and terrible and magical place. It might have been a day or a week or a month. Time had no significance. I remember darkness coming and going, but the longer I stayed, the more I became a part of the collected energy which existed there, until I no longer felt separate at all. The bones I walked on might have been my bones. The soul of the mountain might have been my soul. I became part of the mists, and they moved through me in the same way that I moved through them.

I don’t know, either, what conditions arose to bring about my departure. I remember, though, that from the mists, where nothing had form, a spiralling particle began to dance with a second one, and then a third and a fourth. I watched, enchanted, as the specks drew light from the surrounding air and resolved it into a pair of golden eyes. They seemed to drill right into my heart and plant a hook there, and even as I watched them I found myself beginning to move towards the edge of the mountain.

The next thing I remember was finding myself outside it, as though I no longer deserved its approval. I was moving away across the crater and I tried to turn back, to re-enter its cold embrace, but I was unable to do it. Something else, some other force, was drawing me away. I was regaining awareness of my body, and it felt heavy and clumsy; an onerous encumbrance which was necessary for existence beyond the skirts of the beloved mountain. I didn’t want it. I didn’t want to leave. But it seemed that I had no choice in the matter. Against my will, I found myself retracing my steps towards the cracked wall of the crater and along the steep-sided gully by which I had entered.

It wasn’t until then that the horror of what had happened began to sink in. I had been so totally absorbed by the mists that I had completely lost my individuality and my autonomy. The further I got from the cloud mountain, the more frightened I became of the effect it had produced upon me. Any thoughts of returning created a turmoil of revulsion in my re-established consciousness.

I understood now the reason for Dabbo’s fear.

But I still didn’t understand why I had broken free. By the time night began to fall I was climbing the last stages of the gully neck. My feet, which had become soaked in the stream lower down, were beginning to freeze in the snows and I was in quite some discomfort. I was anxious to get back to the hut, desperate for shelter and the meagre sense of security it offered, when I first noticed the beguiler.

It was then that I remembered watching it form inside the mountain, and I came to the conclusion that it must have somehow constituted itself out of the miasma in response to my presence, or to my increased receptivity. But at the time when it first became visible in the growing dusk, it knocked all logical thinking out of my mind. All I knew was that I had accomplished what I had set out to do. Like Dabbo before me, I had survived the ordeal of the cloud mountain and emerged with my reward.

W
HEN I REACHED THE
top of the gully I stopped and appraised the beguiler. It bobbed and darted above my head, cutting brief comet trails through the dark air, creating a glorious display, for my eyes only. A wave of possessiveness swept over me. It was mine. I had caught it. For a few unforgettable minutes I was euphoric. Against all the odds I had prevailed. I imagined my parents’ faces filling with astonishment as they watched their renegade daughter walking triumphantly into the village, beguiler in tow. A flush of warmth drove the cold from my bones and I set out again; a hero, reprieved from mortal suffering by my triumph.

But the impression didn’t last for long. By the time I reached the valley where I had first encountered Hemmy’s chuffie, my body had begun to feel burdened by a massive weight. Even worse than that was the sense that my mind was similarly encumbered. The snows were bright; the chuffies’ path was clear and smooth, but it seemed to be absurdly difficult to stick to it. Whenever I looked up, the beguiler was there, shimmering in its own brilliance, offering delights beyond the drudgery of human endeavour. But something inside me, some stubborn and indefatigable will, made me determined to reach the hut. I sent reverent thanks to Dabbo. If ever I had been contemptuous of him, I apologised for it now. In that vast, silver night, the prospect of the sanctuary that he had created was all that kept me going. And when I did, eventually, reach it, no homecoming had ever felt so welcome or so secure.

The cold slab might have been a feather bed. For a while I lay awake, trying to process the massive amounts of new information that were jostling for attention in my mind. The memory of the cloud mountain brought swift clutches of fear each time I touched on it, but despite the difficulty of my last, short journey, I found I had no anxieties about the beguiler at all. I was positive that I could manage it.

With that thought still sitting smugly in my consciousness, I dropped into oblivion.

The next thing I knew was the cold shock of powdery snow against my face. It was a moment or two before I realised what was happening, but as soon as I did I understood what a fool I had been to have such confidence in my powers of resistance. Even while I slept the beguiler had asserted its influence, and I had wandered in a dream over a surprising distance. It hovered above me now, as I fought my way out of the deep snow-drift, its bright eyes boring into mine, compelling me to get up and start moving again. But I could tell this time where it was trying to take me. My footprints led away from the door of the hut and angled sharply back, taking the smoothest and quickest route towards the sheer edge of the crater. Another few yards and it would all have been over for me.

The fright galvanised me and, with a colossal effort, I turned my back on the beguiler and began to labour back through the snow towards the hut. Every step was an ordeal. It seemed as though my innards were harnessed to a boulder which I had to haul uphill, like the man in the story who displeased the gods. But I was driven by a fear that was stronger than the power of the beguiler and though my heart was galloping like a hunted hare, I made it back to the hut.

When I got there I remembered the length of gut that had been part of Dabbo’s equipment. I needed it now, and I used it immediately, tying one end around my ankle and the other to one of the door’s rusted hinges. I don’t know what qualities that little length of cord had but, like the shawl, it did what Dabbo had promised it would. When I eventually succeeded in quieting my heart I sank back and closed my eyes; slept again, or perhaps got up and walked; sleep-walked back to the cloud mountain. Now there were sounds there; the spine-chilling howls of beguilers, the cries of forsaken travellers carried on the wind, my own voice, calling desperately for help. I was still calling feebly when I woke, my breath constricted by fear.

Outside the open door I could see particles of snow in the air. It might have been loose flakes tossed up by a breeze, or it might have been a light blizzard. Either way it gave me the excuse to do what I wanted to do, which was to stay exactly where I was. I needed rest.

Throughout what remained of the day, I stayed wrapped up in the shawl, slipping in and out of sleep, my thoughts and my dreams running into each other. None of them cast much light on my situation, but I remember that during one spell of clarity I came to understand something about my society’s responsibility in the whole, strange situation. By trying to avoid distress; by allowing the chuffies to soak up all our sorrow and anger and upset, we created the beguilers.

I now know that it was true that chuffies travelled to the cloud mountain when they were too worn out to serve our purpose any longer. It was true that they died there, or at least they left their bones to spill out around the edges of the mist. But that wasn’t the end of them. In some strange way they became part of the mountain, adding their accumulation of anguish, and when there was enough of it in there to create imbalance, a beguiler was born. It could be said that they were the souls of chuffies, returning to human society to demand the payment of debts. That was why they led people to their deaths. An eye for an eye. A life for a life. The beguilers were bound to the mountainside until they had claimed their payment. After that they disappeared, or were released; to where and to what there was no way of knowing.

And I, now, was bound to a beguiler. I couldn’t imagine how I had ever been such a fool as to think that I would succeed where so many others had failed. And the more I thought about it, the more afraid I became. As the day wore on, the same thoughts returned to torment me again and again and, no matter which way I turned them, I found that there were only two possibilities open to me. The first was to become as deranged as Dabbo and Shirsha. The second, the escape route, was to die.

Compared to life-long misery, death seemed to me to be preferable. Who would miss me, after all? What had I to live for? There would, at least, be one less beguiler to harass the villagers and the travellers on the mountainside. But I was rescued from my self-destructive tendencies by a new realisation. Perhaps I did have reason to live. I had learnt something new; the relationship between chuffies and beguilers, and I surely had a responsibility to pass it on. If I could succeed in returning home without losing my mind, I could tell the other villagers about it. What they chose to do with the knowledge was not my concern, but I had to try and reach them.

I
WAS AWAKE LONG
before dawn, but I didn’t make a move; didn’t even uncover my head, until the sun was well up and the beguiler had faded into invisibility. But as I left the hut behind me, I was immediately aware of its influence, trying to pull me back towards the crater wall.

Cut off your feelings, Shirsha had said. I understood now that it was the only protection I had. If I could erect a barrier in my mind that would protect me from that dreadful weight of sorrow, I could resist the beguiler’s power and move more freely.

It was like constructing a wall of sand against a rising tide. There was no way of making a strong, permanent barrier. Instead I was engaged in a constant process. I built, and the beguiler undermined. It was exhausting, but I was at least making some measure of headway across the snows. At the bottom of the steep escarpment which led up to the porters’ path, I stopped for a rest and ate two nuts. With the strength they gave me, I succeeded in scaling the crag and struggling on up to the track. It was a significant milestone; an achievement to have made it even that far, but I couldn’t allow myself any self-congratulation. The well trodden path was quite clear, but how much progress I would be able to make along it was not clear at all.

I stopped again and looked down into the valley below me. I could see the grey smoke of cooking fires rising from a porters’ lodge a mile or so below the snow line. The men would probably have started out already, but if there were any on the trail behind me they were hidden from view by its numerous hills and bends.

The homely sight of the buildings tempted me. In a couple of hours of easy walking I could be there with them, trading my remaining nuts and buying a hot meal. Would people know that I had a beguiler, even though they couldn’t see it? Not immediately, perhaps, but they would if I stayed until nightfall. What if it led someone else off, having failed with me? For an instant the thought was a lifeline to me; a certain solution to the mess I was in. Shirsha’s beguiler had seemed keen to have a try at me, after all. No matter how attached to someone a beguiler might appear to be, it is an illusion. That was why Shirsha lived alone and feared the company of others. Inside twelve hours I could be free of my torment and walking home, unburdened and happy.

I watched the smoke fanning out above the lodges and knew that I couldn’t do it. A wave of passion, stronger than any logic, swept through me. No matter how many problems it might be causing me, the beguiler was a beautiful thing. And it was mine.