Four days later they left. He needed the extra time to organize his foremen — the caravan expected in two months, bills of lading to be signed, vouchers, arrangements of usance, details worked out about the consignment of the salt — but by now the merchant had seemed to come round to the idea of the journey. “We shall have to travel light,” he told them, “only the odd sack or so. Oh, and put by your weapons. They won’t do any good where we’re going.”
“We take our weapons,” Guillalume said.
The merchant glanced at them. “As you wish,” he said.
“Maybe he knows something,” Mills suggested softly.
“Only what I tell him,” Guillalume said, and then to the merchant: “We’ll follow, but if you lead us into a trap I’ll kill you.”
The man shrugged and mounted.
For a week they rode, traveling along the spines of high mountains, Mills and Guillalume breathless in the thin air, their speech irregular, a low, broken, breathless panting. Then winds came, snow, the two Northumbrian horses first listless, then actually balking, while the merchant’s trotted on as nimbly as before, finally disappearing in the snow-obscured distance.
“Now — now — we’re for it,” Mills complained. “We were better — better off — in — in the farm.” His horse moved in front of Guillalume’s.
“What — what — do you mean? Are you blaming — blaming—me—for this? You wanted to — to — get back home as much — as I did,” Guillalume said, and the horses were abreast of each other again.
“It’s — a—tr—trap.” Mills’s horse edged forward.
“What—what is?” They were neck and neck.
“Th — this.” He indicated the altitude, the four or five inches of snow through which they plodded. “It’s — it’s a — trap and now — you’ll — you’ll have — to kill him. — Like you, you said.” Mills’s horse took the lead. “Have to — to — to — kill — kill him.” Mills started to laugh. He laughed giddily in the high air, unable to stop. “Only — hee hee — where — where—is—hee hee — he?” He looked around. Guillalume had disappeared behind him in the white heights, in the heavily falling snow.
“Where — air — where — air — are yooo? — Where are you, Mill — Mill—Mills?”
Mills was helpless to answer. He turned and saw Guillalume’s horse emerge from a cloudbank. It’s the talking, he realized. That’s what engines them, fuels them.
“Damn—damn you, Mills — Wait up.” (Though Greatest Grandfather said Guillalume had no breath for italics, that it was not class now or affectation which punched up his words so much as the actual explosions of his pressured lungs.)
So they had a horserace. Talking to each other while the horses overheard, seeming actual interested parties, cantering eavesdroppers. And this was when Mills got to say things to his master, and his master to Mills, which otherwise neither would have said to the other.
“The reason,” Guillalume said, his breath easier now, “some men command and others obey, has nothing to do with fitness, nor law, nor even custom. God does not sanction nor Nature compel fatality.” They believed — the snow had stopped falling and the mountains glistened like great bright boulders — that they rode in the sky, that their horses brisked along a ledge of cloud. The broad valleys beneath them seemed domesticate, lulled, standing pat as potted earth, quiescent as houseplant. “Only man needs men. I require a valet because I cannot dress myself, an upstairs maid because I can’t make beds. My doorman knows better than I the ins and outs of my house. You should be flattered, Mills. The drudge, the erk, the groom and porter — the help, Mills. The char and babysitter, the footman, lackey, cook and page. The turnspit and amah, the housecarl and equerry. Seneschals and cellarers. All my menial men, Mills, fixed more by skills than bayonets, talent than circumstance. You brood too much on blood, boy.”
“I lug your bathwater,” Mills called after him. “It’s my finger scalds to test the temperature. There’s no talent there, only patience and torpor. You got the guns. Your lot does. Where you got them or who gave them I don’t know. The devil, I think, because only the devil wouldn’t know better or wouldn’t care than to trust somebody with a gun who can’t make a bed.”
Guillalume’s long list had put him in the lead but Mills’s shouting had narrowed the gap and they were almost abreast of each other again, Mills a length or so behind. They had been descending and were now in the valley they had seen from the sky. The trail had ended, beaching them in abrupt wilderness. Mills looked round from where his mount had just nosed out Guillalume’s and recognized with some surprise that it was fall. It was the first time he’d been conscious of season since coming to Wieliczka. The mines had been landlocked in time, and his shift, from just before daybreak till the sun had gone down, and his exhaustion, had kept him thoughtless of the calendar. Neither of them had any idea where they were. They were lost and did not even know in what country they were lost, or even if it were a country, if it was still the planet, still earth. All they could see were, behind them, the mountains, and everywhere else, save the small apron of clearing on which they stood, the high, blond grasses of a giant, endless steppe.
“Where’d he go?” Mills said.
“He gave us the slip,” said Guillalume.
“We couldn’t have passed him.”
“In the snowstorm. We might have missed him in the snowstorm.”
“That trail was too narrow.”
“He isn’t out there.”
“He give us the slip.”
Then they heard a noise coming toward them through the tall, brittle grass. The next moment the merchant materialized before them as the grasses parted and a hundred wild horsemen followed after.
(“These were the Cossacks,” Greatest Grandfather Mills would explain afterward, “and all they wanted was the Word. It was all any of them wanted.”)
“The word?” Mills said.
“Messages,” the merchant said, having taken the two of them aside. “What the entrails said, what the Tablets. Afflatus, avatar, vatic talebearing, godgossip, gospel.”
“They’re infidels,” Mills said, eyeing their weapons, their pikes ready to their hands as their reins, the whips which lay like embroidered quoit over their saddlehoms.
“No one is infidel,” the merchant said. “Show them death and they whistle hymns. Speak to them.”
“Me?”
“They watched you come down the mountain. They saw you bring up the rear, they watched you pass.”
“I don’t—”
“They saw your sacking, Guillalume’s linen.”
“I don’t—”
“They know their textiles. ‘The last shall be first.’ Strangers rare here. No concept of travel. Someone just passing through beyond them. They think you come to tell them things.”
“Me?”
“You speak now.”
“What will I say?”
“Make it good.”
“I don’t even talk their language.”
“I translate.” The merchant yanked his horse about, turned away from him. “Make it good,” he warned again, his back to him. He joined the warriors.
The merchant said something to them and the wild men looked at Mills as if through a single pair of eyes. Guillalume separated himself from Mills and went toward the merchant while the warriors waited for Mills to begin. “Make it good,” he mouthed before riding off.
“I have come,” Mills said, “I have come—” The merchant translated and the warriors watched Mills closely. Mills cleared his throat. “I have come,” he began again. They watched him impatiently and one drew a pike from where it rested in its sheath. “I’ve come, I say,” said Mills and looked helplessly at the merchant. The merchant translated. One of the warriors clutched his whip. The man drew his arm back slowly. “No, wait,” Mills shouted, clambering down from his horse. The merchant translated. “I’ve come to tell you,” Mills said nervously, “that — that—” The Cossack with the whip gently rolled the hard, thin, braided leather within inches of Mills’s feet. Mills looked down gloomily at the dangerous plaited rawhide. “Not,” he exclaimed forcefully, “to hit. Not to hit. I have come to tell you not to hit!”