Niamh touched her quivering shoulders gently.
“No, dear Arjala, not foolish. And, yes, I think we all know what it is that you are saying…”
And then it was the turn of Nimbalim of Yoth to speak out.
The old man rose slowly from his place on the sled, his lined face saintly.
“I should have known freedom was not for me,” he said softly into the silence. “But I have tasted the sweetness of it, and that taste is enough to sustain me for the years ahead. It is my weight that has overburdened your craft, and it is I who must dismount. No, do not try to stop me. I am old. My life is behind me. But you are young, with your lives ahead of you. I shall get down now, and you, young man, must take my place. Then you may all together fly off to the freedom you deserve, with the heartfelt blessings of an old man.”
They talked on, while the minutes raced by.
And all the while Clyon watched them in the screen, his hand hovering above the button that would summon the thought-police.
Chapter 19
The Color of Delgan’s Heart
The eruption of the Witchlight was a glare which blinded me, even though I had turned my face away and sought to cover my eyes.
I had forgotten that I faced the river. The gliding floods acted like a giant mirror, casting the dazzling rays back into my face.
The agony was indescribable. I fell on my knees in the mud at the river’s bank, sobbing with the pain of my burned eyes. Tears wet my face; I could hardly think straight. I would have died, then and there, helpless in the grip of blinding pain, had the Nithhogg-monster struck.
As it was, the titanic worm died first.
A yell of amazement burst wildly from the lips of Delgan.
Little Klygon voiced a yelp of astonishment himself.
I could see nothing, but I could still hear.
The ground shook as to the tremors of an earthquake. Behind me, there, somewhere in the darkness, a vast thing ponderously died.
“Look at that,” gasped Klygon, clutching my shoulder. Delgan, a bit farther off, laughed in nervous excitement. The ground heaved and shook, and a deafening squeal ripped the air like a steam whistle.
The poundings became fainter. Now the ground but trembled.
A dry, hot wind blew over us.
The stench of burned slime was thick in my nostrils. Thick and nauseous. My stomach heaved in distress, but the agony in my scorched eyes was unendurable. I could attend to nothing else but the enormity of the pain.
Finally the earth shook no more. I knew that behind me in the gloom an immense and monstrous thing had died. Ages of life the huge abomination had known, but I had brought it down to death at last; I, a mere man, the puniest of creatures, had slain the moving mountain of slime with the fury of a captive sun.
Well, it had paid me back …
After a time I heard the mud squelch as my companions got to their feet, it seemed, and began looking around them.
“Now,” muttered Klygon wearily, “how do we cross this cursed stretch of water? Any ideas, lad? Lad—?”
I took my hands away from my face and let them see my eyes.
Klygon sucked in his breath sharply between his teeth.
Delgan uttered an involuntary cry.
Neither said anything.
Not that there was much to say.
In the end we decided not to cross the river at all, but to let it carry us to wherever it was going.
The fact of the matter was that by now we were so completely lost that it didn’t much matter which direction we chose to travel. One way was about the same as another.
We floated downstream on a gigantic fallen leaf.
The leaves of the giant trees are bigger than bedsheets. When they are dry and crisp and fallen, they tend to curl up, forming something that felt to my blind touch very Like a canoe. And certainly something about the same size.
Klygon had bathed my burned eyes in cool river water, with hands as gentle as a woman’s. Then he scooped up the cold wet mud and plastered handfuls of it upon my poor eyes. It felt very soothing. The pain had gone away by now, leaving me weak and shaken. But the after images of the blast still quivered in the darkness of my vision like flakes of trembling fire.
They would never fade away, those flakes of fire.
Then the little Assassin bound a damp cloth about the mudpack, and that was all he could do for me, the little map who had taught me the gentle art of murder.
Leaving me to rest, Delgan and Klygon had scouted up and down the river bank for an hour or more, hoping to find a ford by which we might cross the floods, or a fallen branch or root spanning the watery way like a natural bridge.
They found neither. What they found was a leaf.
A leaf so huge it took both of them to carry. A leaf that would be our canoe on the first sea voyage ever recorded in the annals of the World of the Green Star, or, at least, the first one known to me.
For two days we drifted with the stream, without the slightest notion of where or how our voyage would end. Just to be going somewhere was enough, it satisfied our restless urge to become once again the masters of our fate. Slavery and imprisonment does that to you after a while, I think.
The hours passed by me unobserved; I existed in a numb, mindless state, hardly hearing the muttered and desultory conversation that passed between my companions, not knowing where we were going, nor why, and not caring, either.
The pain had passed by now, leaving me weak and feeble, and curiously empty of all sensation. It was as if the agony of that intolerable light, lancing into my eyes, piercing into my brain, had seared away all consciousness and feeling. I let myself drift with the flow of events, much as we now drifted with the flow of the river, unable and uncaring to exert an influence on my motions. I let my companions tend me as they pleased, feed me, set an acorn-cup of fresh water to my lips. I slept when they bade me sleep, waked when they bade me rouse myself. I felt dumb, indifferent, a hollow shell.
From this point on I would be only a burden to them. A man who cannot see cannot fight. A blind leader is a contradiction in terms. I had lost control of my life when I lost the ability to see; no longer was I, in any sense, the master of my fate, the captain of my soul.
I was a cripple.
I had been a cripple all my life, back on Earth. From that living death of helplessness I had thought to escape by developing the power to free my soul from its house of clay. By astral travel I had wandered between the stars, finding here on the world of the giant trees a strong new body and an exciting new life.
And now I was a cripple again …
It was cruel. But, then, life itself can be cruel at times.
In my listless, half-aware state I do not know how many hours or days we sailed down the river, using a crisp, curled leaf for our boat. I did not live; I but existed.
Yet was I dimly conscious of a gathering tension between my two companions. A silence of mutual suspicion and discord grew between them. Had I been truly there, awake and alert and partaking in the voyage, I might have slackened the tension by my careless humor or well-chosen words. I might have distracted them from the discord that developed between them. Alas, that I was too wrapped up in my horrid blindness to know or care what passed between them! All I could think about, endlessly, was the loss of my eyesight.
I had known that, from the very first, Klygon had been suspicious of the bland, ingratiating, suave, and cunning ways of Delgan. And the mysterious blue man, whose origins we had never learned, had not been able to hit it off with the crude, rough-spoken spawn of the gutters of Ardha. The gulf between them was too deep to be more than temporarily breached by their being forced by events to share in adversity.