The Telling

SIX

She went to TALK to Odiedin Manma. Despite his enigmatic telling, despite the uncanny event (which she was now quite sure she had merely imagined) in his class, she had found him the most worldly and politically knowledgeable of the maz she knew, and she badly wanted some practical counsel. She waited till after his class and then begged him for advice.

"Does Maz Elyed want me to go to this place, this umyazu, because she thinks if I go there, my presence will help keep it safe? I think she might be wrong. I think the blue-and-tans are tracking me all the time. It’s a secret place, a hidden place, isn’t it? If I went, they could just follow me. They may have all kinds of tracking devices."

Odiedin held up his hand, mild but unsmiling. "I don’t think they’ll track you, yoz. They have orders from Dovza to let you be. Not to follow and observe you."

"You know that?"

He nodded.

She believed him. She remembered the invisible web she had sensed when she first lived here. Odiedin was one of the spiders.

"Anyhow, the way to Silong isn’t an easy track to follow. And you could leave very quietly." He chewed his lip a little. A hint of warmth, a pleasurable look, had come into his dark, severe face. "If Maz Elyed suggested that you go there, and if you want to go there," he said, "I’d show you the way."

"You would?"

"I was at the Lap of Silong once. I was twelve. My parents were maz. It was a bad time then. When the books were burned. A lot of police. A lot of loss, destruction. Arrests. Fear. So we left Okzat, went up into the hills, to the hill towns. And then, in the summer, all the way round Zubuam, to the lap of the Mother. I’d like very much to go that way again before I die, yoz."

Sutty tried to leave no track, ’no footprints in the dust.’ She sent no word to Tong except that she planned to do nothing much the next few months except a little hiking and climbing. She spoke to none of her friends, acquaintances, teachers, except Elyed and Odiedin. She fretted about her crystals — four, now, for she had cleared her noter again. She could not leave them at Iziezi’s house, the first place the blue-and-tans would look for them. She was trying to decide where to bury them and how to do it without being seen, when Ottiar and Uming in the most casual way told her that since the police were so busy at the moment, they were storing their mandala away in a safe place for a while, and did she have anything she’d like to stash away with it? Their intuition seemed amazing, until Sutty remembered that they were part of the spiderweb — and had lived their adult lives in secrecy, hiding all that was most precious to them. She gave them the crystals. They told her where the hiding place was. "Just in case," Ottiar said mildly. She told them who Tong Ov was and what to tell him, just in case. They parted with loving embraces.

Finally she told Iziezi about the long hike she planned to take in the mountains.

"Akidan is going with you," Iziezi said with a cheerful smile.

Akidan was out with friends. The two women were eating dinner together at the table in the red-carpeted corner of Iziezi’s immaculate kitchen. It was a ’little-feast’ night: several small dishes, delicately intense in flavor, surrounding a bland, creamy pile of tuzi. It reminded Sutty of the food of her far-off childhood. "You’d like basmati rice, Iziezi!" she said. Then she heard what her friend had said.

"Into the mountains? But it— We may be gone a long time."

"He’s been up in the hills several times. He’ll be seventeen this summer."

"But what will you do?" Akidan ran his aunt’s errands, did her shopping, sweeping, fetching and carrying, helped her when a crutch slipped.

"My cousin’s daughter will come stay with me."

"Mizi? But she’s only six!"

"She’s a help."

"Iziezi, I don’t know if this is a good idea. I may go a long way. Even stay the winter in one of the villages up there."

"Dear Sutty, Ki isn’t your responsibility. Maz Odiedin Manma told him to come. To go with a teacher to the Lap of Silong is the dream of his life. He wants to be a maz. Of course he has to grow up and find a partner. Maybe finding a partner is what he’s mostly thinking about, just now." She smiled a little, not so cheerfully. "His parents were maz," she said.

"Your sister?"

"She was Maz Ariezi Meneng." She used the forbidden pronoun, she/he/they. Her face had fallen into its set expression of pain. "They were young," she said. A long pause. "Ki’s father, Meneng Ariezi, everybody loved him. He was like the old heroes, like Penan Teran, so handsome and brave… He thought being a maz was like armor. He believed nothing could hurt her/him/ them. There was a while, then, three or four years, when things were going along more like the old days. No arrests. No more troops of young people from down there breaking windows, painting everything white, shouting… It quieted down. The police didn’t come here much. We all thought it was over, it would go back to being like it used to be. Then all of a sudden there were a lot of them. That’s how they are. All of a sudden. They said there were, you know, too many people here breaking the law, reading, telling… They said they’d clean the city. They paid skuyen to inform on people. I knew people who took their money." Her face was tight, closed. "A lot of people got arrested. My sister and her husband. They took them to a place called Erriak. Somewhere way off, down there. An island, I think. An island in the sea. A rehabilitation center. Five years ago we heard that Ariezi was dead. A notice came. We never have heard anything about Meneng Ariezi. Maybe he’s still alive."

"How long ago… ?"

"Twelve years."

"Ki was four?"

"Nearly five. He remembers them a little. I try to help him remember them. I tell him about them."

Sutty said nothing for a while. She cleared the table, came and sat down again. "Iziezi, you’re my friend. He’s your child. He is my responsibility. It could be dangerous. They could follow us."

"Nobody follows the people of the Mountain to the Mountain, dear Sutty."

They all had that serene, foolhardy confidence when they talked about the mountains. No blame. Nothing to fear. Maybe they had to think that way in order to go on at all.

Sutty bought a nearly weightless, miraculously insulated sleeping bag for herself, and one for Akidan. Iziezi protested pro forma. Akidan was delighted and, like a child, slept in his sleeping bag from that night on, sweltering.

She got her boots and fleeces out again, packed her backpack, and in the early morning of the appointed day walked with Akidan to the gathering place. It was spring on the edge of summer. The streets were dim blue in morning twilight, but up there to the northwest the great wall stood daylit, the peak was flying its radiant banners. We’re going there, Sutty thought, we’re going there! And she looked down to see if she was walking on the earth or on the air.

Vast slopes rose up all round to hanging glaciers and the glare of hidden ice fields. Their group of eight trudged along in line, so tiny in such hugeness that they seemed to be walking in place. Far up above them wheeled two geyma, the long-winged carrion birds that dwelt only among the high peaks, and flew always in pairs.

Six had set out: Sutty, Odiedin, Akidan, a young woman named Kieri, and a maz couple in their thirties, Tobadan and Siez. In a hill village four days out from Okzat-Ozkat two guides had joined them, shy, gentle-mannered men with weathered faces, whose age was hard to determine — somewhere between thirty and seventy. They were named Ieyu and Long.

The group had gone up and down in those hills for a week before they ever came to what these people called mountains. Then they had begun to climb. They had climbed steadily, daily, for eleven days now.

The luminous wall of Silong looked exactly the same, no nearer. A couple of insignificant 5,000-meter peaks to the north had shifted place and shrunk a bit. The guides and the three maz, with their trained memory for descriptive details and figures, knew the names and heights of all the peaks. They used a measure of altitude, pieng. As well as Sutty could recall, 15,000 pieng was about 5,000 meters; but since she wasn’t certain her memory was correct, she mostly left the figures in pieng. She liked hearing these great heights, but she did not try to remember them, or the names of the mountains and passes. She had resolved before they set out never to ask where they were, where they were going, or how far they had yet to go. She had held to that resolve the more easily as it left her childishly free.

There was no trail as such except near villages, but there were charts that like river pilots’ charts gave the course by landmarks and alignments: When the north scarp of Mien falls behind the Ears of Taziu… Odiedin and the other maz pored over these charts nightly with the two guides who had joined them in the foothills. Sutty listened to the poetry of the words. She did not ask the names of the tiny villages they passed through. If the Corporation, or even the Ekumen, ever demanded to know the way to the Lap of Silong, she could say in all truth that she did not know it.

She didn’t know even the name of the place they were going to. She had heard it called the Mountain, Silong, the Lap of Si-long, the Taproot, the High Umyazu. Possibly there was more than one place. She knew nothing about it. She resisted her desire to learn the name for everything, the word for everything. She was living among people to whom the highest spiritual attainment was to speak the world truly, and who had been silenced. Here, in this greater silence, where they could speak, she wanted to learn to listen to them. Not to question, only to listen. They had shared with her the sweetness of ordinary life lived mindfully. Now she shared with them the hard climb to the heights.

She had worried about her fitness for this trek. A month in the hill country of Ladakh and a few hiking holidays in the Chilean

Andes were the sum of her mountaineering, and those had not been climbs, just steep walking. That was what they were doing now, but she wondered how high they would go. She had never walked above 4,000 meters. So far, though they must be that high by now, she had had no trouble except for running short of breath on stiff uphill stretches. Even Odiedin and the guides took it slow when the way got steep. Only Akidan and Kieri, a tough, rotund girl of twenty or so, raced up the endless slopes, and danced on outcroppings of granite over vast blue abysses, and were never out of breath. The eberdibi, the others called them — the kids, the calves.

They had walked a long day to get to a summer village: six or seven stone rings with yurts set up on them among steep, stony pastures tucked in the shelter of a huge curtain wall of granite. Sutty had been amazed to find how many people lived up here where it seemed there was nothing to live on but air and ice and rock. The vast, barren-seeming foothills far above Okzat-Ozkat had turned out to be full of villages, pasturages, small stone-walled fields. Even here among the high peaks there were habitations, the summer villages. Villagers came up from the hills through the late spring snow with their animals, the kind of eberdin called minule. Horned, half wild, with long legs and long pale wool, the minule pastured as high as grass grew and bore their young in the highest alpine meadows. Their fine, silky fleece was valuable even now in the days of artificial fibers. The villagers sold their wool, drank their milk, tanned their hides for shoes and clothing, burned their dung for fuel.

These people had lived this way forever. To them Okzat-Ozkat, a far provincial outpost of civilisation, was civilisation. They were all Rangma. They spoke some Dovzan in the foothills, and Sutty could converse well enough with Ieyu and Long; but up here, though her Rangma had improved greatly over the winter, she had to struggle to understand the mountain dialect.

The villagers all turned out to welcome the visitors, a jumble of dirty sunburnt smiling faces, racing children, shy babies laced into leather cocoons and hung up on stakes like little trophies, blatting minule with their white, silent, newborn young. Life, life abounding in the high, empty places.

Overhead, as always, were a couple of geyma spiraling lazily on slender dark wings in the dark dazzling blue.

Odiedin and the young maz couple, Siez and Tobadan, were already busy blessing huts and babies and livestock, salving sores and smoke-damaged eyes, and telling. The blessing, if that was the right word for it — the word they used meant something like including or bringing in — consisted of ritual chanting to the tabatt-batt-batt of the little drum, and handing out slips of red or blue paper on which the maz wrote the recipient’s name and age and whatever autobiographical facts they asked to have written,such as—

"Married with Temazi this winter."

"Built my house in the village."

"Bore a son this winter past. He lived one day and night. His name was Enu."

"Twenty-two minulibi born this season to my flock."

"I am Ibien. I was six years old this spring."

As far as she could tell, the villagers could read only a few characters or none at all. They handled the written slips of paper with awe and deep satisfaction. They examined them for a long time from every direction, folded them carefully, slipped them into special pouches or finely decorated boxes in their house or tent. The maz had done a blessing or ingathering like this in every village they passed through that did not have a maz of its own. Some of the telling boxes in village houses, magnificently carved and decorated, had hundreds of these little red and blue record slips in them, tellings of lives present, lives past.

Odiedin was writing these for a family, Tobadan was dispensing herbs and salve to another family, and Siez, having finished the chant, had sat down with the rest of the population to tell. A narrow-eyed, taciturn young man, Siez in the villages became a fountain of words.

Tired and a little buzzy-headed — they must have come up another kilometer today-and liking the warmth of the afternoon sun, Sutty joined the half circle of intently gazing men and women and children, cross-legged on the stony dust, and listened with them.

"The telling!" Siez said, loudly, impressively, and paused.

His audience made a soft sound, ah, ah, and murmured to one another.

"The telling of a story!"

Ah, ah, murmur, murmur.

"The story is of Dear Takieki!"

Yes, yes. The dear Takieki, yes.

"Now the story begins! Now, the story begins when dear Takieki was still living with his old mother, being a grown man, but foolish. His mother died. She was poor. All she had to leave him was a sack of bean meal that she had been saving for them to eat in the winter. The landlord came and drove Takieki out of the house."

Ah, ah, the listeners murmured, nodding sadly.

"So there went Takieki walking down the road with the sack of bean meal slung over his shoulder. He walked and he walked, and on the next hill, walking toward him, he saw a ragged man. They met in the road. The man said, ’That’s a heavy sack you carry, young man. Will you show me what is in it?’ So Takieki did that. ’Bean meal!’ says the ragged man."

Bean meal, whispered a child.

’"And what fine bean meal it is! But it’ll never last you through the winter. I’ll make a bargain with you, young man. I’ll give you a real brass button for that bean meal!’

"’Oh, ho,’ says Takieki, ’you think you’re going to cheat me, but I’m not so foolish as that!’"

Ah, ah.

"So Takieki hoisted his sack and went on. And he walked and he walked, and on the next hill, coming toward him, he saw a ragged girl. They met in the road, and the girl said, ’A heavy sack you’re carrying, young man. How strong you must be! May I see what’s in it?’ So Takieki showed her the bean meal, and she said, ’Fine bean meal! If you’ll share it with me, young man, I’ll go along with you, and I’ll make love with you whenever you like, as long as the bean meal lasts.’"

A woman nudged the woman sitting by her, grinning.

"’Oh, ho,’ says Takieki, ’you think you’re going to cheat me, but I’m not so foolish as that!’

"And he slung his sack over his shoulder and went on. And he walked and he walked, and on the next hill, coming toward him, he saw a man and woman."

Ah, ah, very softly.

"The man was dark as dusk and the woman bright as dawn, and they wore clothing all of bright colors and jewels of bright colors, red, blue. They met in the road, and he/she/they said, ‘What a heavy sack you carry, young man. Will you show us what’s in it?’ So Takieki did that. Then the maz said, ‘What fine bean meal! But it will never last you through the winter.’ Takieki did not know what to say. The maz said, ‘Dear Takieki, if you give us the sack of bean meal your mother gave you, you may have the farm that lies over that hill, with five barns full of grain, and five storehouses full of meal, and five stables full of eberdin. Five great rooms are in the farmhouse, and its roof is of coins of gold. And the mistress of the house is in the house, waiting to be your wife.’

‘Oh, ho,’ said Takieki. ‘You think you’re going to cheat me, but I’m not so foolish as that!’

"And he walked on and he walked on, over the hill, past the farm with five barns and five storehouses and five stables and a roof of gold, and so he went walking on, the dear Takieki."

Ah, ah, ah! said all the listeners, with deep contentment. And they relaxed from their intensity of listening, and chatted a little, and brought Siez a cup and a pot of hot tea so that he could refresh himself, and waited respectfully for whatever he would tell next.

Why was Takieki ’dear’? Sutty wondered. Because he was foolish? (Bare feet standing on air.) Because he was wise? But would a wise man have distrusted the maz? Surely he was foolish to turn down the farm and five barns and a wife. Did the story mean that to a holy man a farm and barns and a wife aren’t worth a bag of bean meal? Or did it mean that a holy man, an ascetic, is a fool? The people she had lived with this year honored self-restraint but did not admire self-deprivation. They had no strenuous notions of fasting, and saw no virtue whatever in discomfort, hunger, poverty.

If it had been a Terran parable, most likely Takieki ought to have given the ragged man the bean meal for the brass button, or just given it for nothing, and then when he died he’d get his reward in heaven. But on Aka, reward, whether spiritual or fiscal, was immediate. By his performance of a maz’s duties, Siez was not building up a bank account of virtue or sanctity; in return for his story-telling he would receive praise, shelter, dinner, supplies for their journey, and the knowledge that he had done his job. Exercises were performed not to attain an ideal of health or longevity but to achieve immediate well-being and for the pleasure of doing them. Meditation aimed toward a present and impermanent transcendance, not an ultimate nirvana. Aka was a cash, not a credit, economy.

Therefore their hatred of usury. A fair bargain and payment on the spot.

But then, what about the girl who offered to share what she had if he’d share what he had. Wasn’t that a fair bargain?

Sutty puzzled over it all through the next tale, a famous bit of The Valley War that she had heard Siez tell several times in villages in the foothills — "I can tell that one when I’m sound asleep," he said. She decided that a good deal depended on how aware Takieki was of his own simplicity. Did he know the girl might trick him? Did he know he wasn’t capable of managing a big farm? Maybe he did the right thing, hanging on to what his mother gave him. Maybe not.

As soon as the sun dropped behind the mountain wall to the west, the air in that vast shadow dropped below freezing. Everyone huddled into the hut-tents to eat, choking in the smoke and reek. The travelers would sleep in their own tents set up alongside the villagers’ larger ones. The villagers would sleep naked, unwashed, promiscuous under heaps of silken pelts full of grease and fleas. In the tent she shared with Odiedin, Sutty thought about them before she slept. Brutal people, primitive people, the Monitor had said, leaning on the rail of the riverboat, looking up the long dark rise of the land that hid the Mountain. He was right. They were primitive, dirty, illiterate, ignorant, superstitious. They refused progress, hid from it, knew nothing of the March to the Stars. They hung on to their sack of bean meal.

Ten days or so after that, camped on neve in a long, shallow valley among pale cliffs and glaciers, Sutty heard an engine, an airplane or helicopter. The sound was distorted by wind and echoes. It might have been quite near or bounced from mountainside to mountainside from a long way off. There was ground fog blowing in tatters, a high overcast. Their tents, dun-colored, in the lee of an icefall, might be invisible in the vast landscape or might be plain to see from the air. They all held still as long as they could hear the stutter and rattle in the wind.

That was a weird place, the long valley. Icy air flowed down into it from the glaciers and pooled on its floor. Ghosts of mist snaked over the dead white snow.

Their food supplies were low. Sutty thought they must be close to their goal.

Instead of climbing up out of the long valley as she had expected, they descended from it on a long, wide slope of boulders. The wind blew without a pause and so hard that the gravel chattered ceaselessly against the larger stones. Every step was difficult, and every breath. Looking up now they saw Silong palpably nearer, the great barrier wall reaching across the sky. But the bannered crest still stood remote behind it. All Sutty’s dreams that night were of a voice she could hear but could not understand, a jewel she had found but could not touch.

The next day they kept going down, down steeply, to the southwest. A chant formed itself in Sutty’s dulled mind: Go back to go forward, fail to succeed. Go down to go upward, fail to succeed.

It would not get out of her head but thumped itself over and over at every jolting step. Go down to go upward, fail to succeed…

They came to a path across the slope of stones, then to a road, to a wall of stones, to a building of stone. Was this their journey’s end? Was this the Lap of the Mother? But it was only a stopping place, a shelter. Maybe it had been an umyazu once. It was silent now. It held no stories. They stayed two days and nights in the cheerless house, resting, sleeping in their sleeping bags. There was nothing to make a fire with, only their tiny cookers, and no food left but dried smoked fish, which they shared out in little portions, soaking it in boiled snow to make soup.

"They’ll come," people said. She did not ask who. She was so tired, she thought she could lie forever in the stone house, like one of the inhabitants of the little white stone houses in the cities of the dead she had seen in South America, resting in peace. Her own people burned their dead. She had always dreaded fire. This was better, the cold silence.

On the third morning she heard bells, a long way off, a faint jangling of little bells. "Come see, Sutty," Kieri said, and coaxed her to get up and stand in the door of the stone house and look out.

People were coming up from the south, winding among the grey boulders that stood higher than they did, people leading minule laden with packs on high saddles. There were poles fixed to the saddles, and from them long red and blue ribbons snapped in the wind. Clusters of little bells were tied into the white neck wool of the young animals that ran beside their mothers.

The next day they started down with the people and the animals to their summer village. It took them three days, but the going was mostly easy. The villagers wanted Sutty to ride one of the minule, but nobody else was riding. She walked. At one place they had to round a cliff under a precipice that continued vertically down from the narrow ledge of the pathway. The path was level, but no wider than a foot’s breadth in places, and the snow on it was softened and loosened by the summer thaw. There they let the minule loose and instead of leading them followed them. They showed Sutty that she should put her feet in the animals’ tracks. She followed one minule meticulously, step by step. Its woolly buttocks swaying nonchalantly, it sauntered along, pausing now and then to look down the sheer drop into the hazy depths with a bored expression. Nobody said anything till they were all off the cliff path. Then there was some laughter and joking, and several villagers made the mountain-heart gesture to Silong.

Down in the village the horned peak could not be seen, only the big shoulder of a nearer mountain and a glimpse of the barrier wall closing off the northwestern sky. The village was in a green place, open to north and south, good summer pasturage, sheltered, idyllic. Trees grew by the river: Odiedin showed them to her. They were as tall as her little finger. Down in Okzat-Ozkat such trees were the shrubs beside the Ereha. In the parks of Dovza City she had walked in their deep shade.

There had been a death among the people, a young man who had neglected a cut on his foot and died of blood poisoning. They had kept the body frozen in snow till the maz could come and perform his funeral. How had they known Odiedin’s group was coming? How had these arrangements been made? She didn’t understand, but she didn’t think about it much. Here in the mountains there was much she didn’t understand. She went along in the moment, like a child. "Tumble and spin and be helpless, like a baby…" Who had said that to her? She was content to walk, content to sit in the sun, content to follow in the footsteps of an animal. Where my guides lead me in kindness, I follow, follow lightly…

The two young maz told the funeral. That was how the people spoke of it. Like all the rites, it was a narrative. For two days Siez and Tobadan sat with the man’s father and aunt, his sister, his friends, a woman who had been married to him for a while, hearing everybody who wanted to talk about him tell them who he had been, what he had done. Now the two young men retold all that, ceremonially and in the formal language, to the soft batt-tabatt of the drum, passing the word one to the other across the body wrapped in white, thin, still-frozen cloth: a praise-song, gathering a life up into words, making it part of the endless telling.

Then Siez recited in his beautiful voice the ending of the story of Penan Teran, a mythic hero couple dear to the Rangma people. Penan and Teran were men of Silong, young warriors who rode the north wind, saddling the wind from the mountains like an eberdin and riding it down to battle, banners flying, to fight the ancient enemy of the Rangma, the sea people, the barbarians of the western plains. But Teran was killed in battle. And Penan led his people out of danger and then saddled the south wind, the sea wind, and rode it up into the mountains, where he leapt from the wind and died.

The people listened and wept, and there were tears in Sutty’s eyes.

Then Tobadan struck the drum as Sutty had never heard it struck, no soft heartbeat but a driving urgent rhythm, to which people lifted up the body and carried it away in procession, swiftly away from the village, always with the drum beating.

"Where will they bury him?" she asked Odiedin.

"In the bellies of the geyma," Odiedin said. He pointed to distant rock spires on one of the mighty slopes above the valley. "They’ll leave him naked there."

That was better than lying in a stone house, Sutty thought. Better far than fire.

"So he’ll ride the wind," she said.

Odiedin looked up at her and after a while quietly assented.

Odiedin never said much, and what he said was often dry; he was not a mild man; but she was by now altogether at ease with him and he with her. He was writing on the little slips of blue and red paper, of which he had a seemingly endless supply in his pack: writing the name and family names of the man who had died, she saw, for those who mourned him to take home and keep in their telling boxes.

"Maz," she said. "Before the Dovzans became so powerful… before they began changing everything, using machinery, making things in factories instead of by hand, making new laws — all that-" Odiedin nodded. "It was after people from the Ekumen came here that they began that. Only about a lifetime ago. What were the Dovzans before that?"

"Barbarians."

He was a Rangma; he hadn’t been able to resist saying it, saying it loud and clear. But she knew he was also a thoughtful, truthful man.

"Were they ignorant of the Telling?"

A pause. He set his pen down. "Long ago, yes. In the time of Penan Teran, yes. When The Arbor was written, yes. Then the people from the central plains, from Doy, began taming them. Trading with them, teaching them. So they learned to read and write and tell. But they were still barbarians, yoz Sutty. They’d rather make war than trade. When they traded, they made a war of it.

They allowed usury, and sought great profits. They always had headmen to whom they paid tribute, men who were rich, and passed power down to their sons. Gobey-bosses. So when they began to have maz, they made the maz into bosses, with the power to rule and punish. Gave the maz the power to tax. They made them rich. They made the sons of maz all maz, by birth. They made the ordinary people into nothing. It was wrong. It was all wrong."

"Maz Uming Ottiar spoke of that time once. As if he remembered it."

Odiedin nodded. "I remember the end of it. It was a bad time. Not as bad as this," he added, with his brief, harsh laugh.

"But this time came from that time. Grew out of it. Didn’t it?"

He looked dubious, thoughtful.

"Why don’t you tell of it?"

No response.

"You don’t tell it, maz. It’s never part of all the histories and tales you tell about the whole world all through the ages. You tell about the far past. And you tell things from your own years, from ordinary people’s lives — at funerals, and when children speak their tellings. But you don’t tell about these great events. Nothing about how the world has changed in the last hundred years."

"None of that is part of the Telling," Odiedin said after a tense, pondering silence. "We tell what is right, what goes right, as it should go. Not what goes wrong."

"Penan Teran lost their battle, a battle with Dovza. It didn’t go right, maz. But you tell it."

He looked up and studied her, not aggressively or with resentment, but from a very great distance. She had no idea what he was thinking or feeling, what he would say.

In the end he said only, "Ah."

The land mine going off? or the soft assent of the listener? She did not know.

He bent his head and wrote the name of the dead man, three bold, elegant characters across the slip of faded red paper. He had ground his ink from a block he carried, mixed it with river water in a tiny stoneware pot. The pen he was using for this writing was a geyma feather, ash-grey. He might have sat here cross-legged on the stony dust, writing a name, three hundred years ago. Three thousand years ago.

She had no business asking him what she had asked him. Wrong, wrong.

But the next day he said to her, "Maybe you’ve heard the Riddles of the Telling, yoz Sutty?"

"I don’t think so."

"Children learn them. They’re very old. What children tell is always the same. What’s the end of a story? When you begin telling it. That’s one of them."

"More a paradox than a riddle," Sutty said, thinking it over. "So the events must be over before the telling begins?"

Odiedin looked mildly surprised, as the maz generally did when she tried to interpret a saying or tale.

"That’s not what it means," she said with resignation.

"It might mean that," he said. And after a while, "Penan leapt from the wind and died: that is Teran’s story."

She had thought he was answering her question about why the maz did not tell about the Corporation State and the abuses that had preceded it. What did the ancient heroes have to do with that?

There was a gap between her mind and Odiedin’s so wide light would need years to cross it.

"So the story went right, it’s right to tell it; you see?" Odiedin said.

"I’m trying to see," she said.

They stayed six days in the summer village in the deep valley, resting. Then they set off again with new provisions and two new guides, north and up. And up, and up. Sutty kept no count of the days. Dawn came, they got up, the sun shone on them and on the endless slopes of rock and snow, and they walked. Dusk came, they camped, the sound of water ceased as the little thaw streams froze again, and they slept.

The air was thin, the way was steep. To the left, towering over them, rose the scarps and slopes of the mountain they were on. Behind them and to the right, peak after far peak rose out of mist and shadow into light, a motionless sea of icy broken waves to the remote horizon. The sun beat like a white drum in the dark blue sky. It was midsummer, avalanche season. They went very soft and silent among the unbalanced giants. Again and again in the daytime the silence quivered into a long, shuddering boom, multiplied and made sourceless by echoes.

Sutty heard people say the name of the mountain they were on, Zubuam. A Rangma word: Thunderer.

They had not seen Silong since they left the deep village. Zubuam’s vast, deeply scored bulk closed off all the west. They inched along, north and up, north and up, in and out of the enormous wrinkles of the mountain’s flank.

Breathing was slow work.

One night it began to snow. It snowed lightly but steadily all the next day.

Odiedin and the two guides who had joined them at the deep village squatted outside the tents that evening and conferred, sketching out lines, paths, zigzags on the snow with gloved fingers.

Next morning the sun leapt brilliant over the icy sea of the eastern peaks. They inched on, sweating, north and up.

One morning as they walked, Sutty realised they were turning their backs to the sun. Two days they went northwest, crawling around the immense shoulder of Zubuam. On the third day at noon they turned a corner of rock and ice. Before them the immense barrier faced them across a vast abyss of air: Silong breaking like a white wave from the depths to the regions of light. The day was diamond-bright and still. The tip of the horned peak could be seen above the ramparts. From it the faintest gossamer wisp of silver trailed to the north.

The south wind was blowing, the wind Penan had leapt from to die.

"Not far now," Siez said as they trudged on, southwestward and down.

"I think I could walk here forever," Sutty said, and her mind said, I will…

During their stay in the deep village, Kieri had moved into her tent. They had been the only women in the group before the new guides joined them. Until then Sutty had shared Odiedin’s tent. A widowed maz, celibate, silent, orderly, he had been a self-effacing, reassuring presence. Sutty was reluctant to make the change, but Kieri pressed her to. Kieri had tented with Akidan till then and was sick of it. She told Sutty, "Ki’s seventeen, he’s in rut all the time. I don’t like boys! I like men and women! I want to sleep with you. Do you want to? Maz Odiedin can share with Ki."

Her use of the words was specific: share meant share the tent, sleep meant join the sleeping bags.

When she realised that, Sutty was more hesitant than ever; but the passivity she had encouraged in herself during the whole of this journey was stronger than her hesitations, and she agreed. Nothing about sex had mattered much to her since Pao’s death. Sometimes her body craved to be touched and roused. Sex was something people wanted and needed. She could respond physically, so long as that was all they asked.

Kieri was strong, soft, warm, and as clean as any of them could be in the circumstances. "Let’s heat up!" she said every night as she got into their joined sleeping bags. She made love to Sutty briefly and energetically and then fell asleep pressed up close against her. They were like two logs in a glowing campfire, burning down, Sutty thought, sinking asleep in the deep warmth.

Akidan had been honored to share the tent with his master and teacher, but he was miffed or frustrated by Kieri’s desertion. He moped around her for a day or two, and then became attentive to the woman who had joined them in the village. The new guides were a brother and sister, a long-legged, round-faced, tireless pair in their twenties, named Naba and Shui. After a day or so Ki moved in with Shui. Odiedin, patient, invited Naba to share his tent.

What had Diodi the barrow man said, years ago, light-years away, back down there in the streets where people lived? "Sex for three hundred years! After three-hundred-year sex anybody can fly!"

I can fly, Sutty thought, plodding on, southward and down. There’s nothing really in the world but stone and light. All the other things, all the things, dissolve back into the two, the stone, the light, and the two back into the one, the flying… And then it will all be born again, it is born again, always, in every moment it’s being born, but all the time there’s only the one, the flying… She plodded on through glory.

They came to the Lap of the Earth.

Though she knew it was implausible, impossible, foolish, Sutty’s imagination had insisted all along that the goal of their journey was a great temple, a mysterious city hidden at the top of the world, stone ramparts, flags flying, priests chanting, gold and gongs and processions. All the imagery of lost Lhasa, Dragon-Tiger Mountain, Machu Picchu. All the ruins of the Earth.

They came steeply down the western flanks of Zubuam for three days in cloudy weather, seldom able to see the barrier wall of Silong across the vast gulf of air where the wind chased coiling clouds and ghostly snow flurries that never came to earth. They followed the guides all one day through cloud and fog along an arete, a long spine of snow-covered rock with a steep drop to either side.

The weather cleared suddenly, clouds gone, sun blazing at the zenith. Sutty was disoriented, looking up for the barrier wall and not finding it. Odiedin came beside her. He said, smiling, "We’re on Silong."

They had crossed over. The enormous mass of rock and ice behind them in the east was Zubuam. An avalanche went curling and smoking down a slanting face of the rock far up on the mountain. A long time later they heard the deep roar of it, the Thunderer telling them what it had to tell.

Zubuam and Silong, they were two and one, too. Old maz mountains. Old lovers.

She looked up at Silong. The heights of the barrier wall loomed directly over them, hiding the summit peak. Sky was a brilliant, jagged-edged slash from north to south.

Odiedin was pointing to the south. She looked and saw only rock, ice, the glitter of thaw water. No towers, no banners.

They set off, trudging along. They were on a path, level and quite clear, marked here and there with piles of flat stones. Often Sutty saw the dry, neat pellets of minule dung beside the way.

In mid-afternoon she made out a pair of rock spires that stuck up from a projecting corner of the mountain ahead like tusks from the lower jaw of a skull. The path narrowed as they got closer to this corner, becoming a ledge along a sheer cliff. When they got to the corner, the two reddish tusks of rock stood before them like a gateway, the path leading between them.

Here they stopped. Tobadan brought out his drum and patted it, and the three maz spoke and chanted. The words were all in Rangma and so old or so formalised that Sutty could not follow their meaning. The two guides from the village and their own guides delved into their packs and brought out little bundles of twigs tied with red and blue thread. They gave them to the maz, who received them with the mountain-heart gesture, facing toward Silong. They set them afire and fixed them among rocks by the pathway to burn down. The smoke smelled like sage, a dry incense. It curled small and blue and lazy among the rocks and along the path. The wind whistled by, a river of turbulent air rushing through the great gap between the mountains, but here in this gateway Silong sheltered them and there was no wind at all.

They picked up their packs and fell into line again, passing between the saber-tooth rocks. The path now bent back inward toward the slope of the mountain, and Sutty saw that it led across a cirque, a level-floored half-moon bay in the mountainside. In the nearly vertical, curving inner wall, still a half kilo or so distant, were black spots or holes. There was some snow on the floor of the. cirque, trodden in an arabesque of paths leading to and from these black holes in the mountain.

Caves, scarred Adien, the ex-miner, who had died of the jaundice in the winter, whispered in her mind. Caves full of being.

The air seemed to thicken like syrup and to quiver, to shake. She was dizzy. Wind roared in her ears, deep and shrill, terrible.

But they were out of the wind, here in the sunlit air of the cirque. She turned back in confusion, then in terror looked upward for the rockslide clattering down upon her. Black shadows crossed the air, the roar and rattle were deafening. She cowered, covering her head with her arms.

Silence.

She looked up, stood up. The others were all standing, like her, statues in the bright sunlight, pools of black shadow at their feet.

Behind them, between the tusks, the gateway rocks, something hung or lay crumpled. It gleamed blindingly and was shadow-black, like a lander seen from the ship in space. A lander — a flyer — a helicopter. She saw the rotor vane jammed up against the outer rock spire. "O Ram," she said.

"Mother Silong," Shui whispered, her clenched hand at her heart.

Then they started back toward the gate, toward the thing, Akidan in the lead, running.

"Wait, Akidan!" Odiedin shouted, but the boy was already there at the thing, the wreck. He shouted something back. Odiedin broke into a run.

Sutty could not breathe. She had to stand a while and still her heart. The older of their guides from the foothill country, Long, a kind, shy man, stood beside her, also trembling, also trying to breathe evenly, easily. They had come down, but they were still at 18,000 pieng, she had heard Siez say, 6,000 meters, a thin air, a terribly thin air. She said the numbers in her head.

"You all right, yoz Long?"

"Yes. You all right, yoz Sutty?"

They went forward together.

She heard Kieri talking: "I saw it, I looked around — I couldn’t believe it — it was trying to fly between the pillars—"

"No, I saw it, it was out there, coming up alongside the pass, coming after us, and then it seemed like a flaw of wind hit it, and tipped it sideways, and just threw it down between the rocks!" That was Akidan.

"She took it in her hands," said Naba, the man from the deep village.

The three maz were at the wreck, in it.

Shui was kneeling near it, smashing something furiously, methodically, with a rock. The remains of a transmitter, Sutty saw. Stone Age revenge, her mind said coldly.

Her mind seemed to be very cold, detached from the rest of her, as if frostbitten.

She went closer and looked at the smashed helicopter. It had burst open in a strange way. The pilot was hanging in his seat straps, almost upside down. His face was mostly hidden by a blood-soaked woollen scarf. She saw his eyes, bits of jelly.

On the stony ground, between Odiedin and Siez, another man lay. His eyes were alive. He was staring up at her. After a while she recognised him.

Tobadan, the healer, was quickly, lightly running his hands over the man’s body and limbs, though surely he couldn’t tell much through the heavy clothing. He kept talking as if to keep the man awake. "Can you take off your helmet?" he asked. After a while the man tried to comply, fumbling with the fastening. Tobadan helped him. He continued gazing up at Sutty with a look of dull puzzlement. His face, always set and hard, was now slack.

"Is he hurt?"

"Yes," Tobadan said. "This knee. His back. Not broken, I think."

"You were lucky," Sutty’s cold mind said, speaking aloud.

The man stared, looked away, made a weak gesture, tried to sit up. Odiedin pressed down gently on his shoulders, saying, "Be quiet. Wait. Sutty, don’t let him get up. We need to get the other man out. People will be here soon."

Looking back into the cirque, toward the caves, she saw little figures hurrying to them across the snow.

She took Odiedin’s place, standing over the Monitor. He lay flat on the dirt with his arms crossed on his chest. He shuddered violently every now and then. She herself was shivering. Her teeth chattered. She wrapped her arms around her body.

"Your pilot is dead," she said.

He said nothing. He trembled.

Suddenly there were people around them. They worked with efficiency, strapping the man onto a makeshift stretcher and lifting it and setting off for the caves, all within a minute or two. Others carried the dead man. Some gathered around Odiedin and the young maz. There was a soft buzz of voices that did nothing but buzz in Sutty’s head, meaningless as the speech of flies.

She looked for Long, joined him, and walked with him across the cirque. It was farther than it had seemed to the mountain wall and the entrance to the caves. Overhead a pair of geyma soared in long, lazy spirals. The sun was already behind the top of the barrier wall. Silong’s vast shadow rose blue against Zubuam.

The caves were like nothing she had ever seen. There were many of them, hundreds, some tiny, no more than bubbles in the rock, some big as the doors of hangars. They made a lacework of circles interlocking and overlapping in the wall of rock, patterns, traceries. The edges of the entrances were fretted with clusters of lesser circles, silvery stone shining against black shadow, like soapsuds, like foam, like the edges of Mandelbrot figures.

Against one entrance a little fence had been set up. Sutty looked in as they passed, and the white face of a young minule looked back at her with dark, quiet eyes. There was a whole stable of the animals built back into the caves. She could smell the pungent, warm, grassy odor of them. The entrances to the caves had been widened and brought down to ground level where necessary, but they kept their circularity. The people she and Long were following entered one of these great round doors into the mountain. Inside, she looked back for a moment at the entrance and saw daylight as a blazing, perfect circle set in dead black.