Again, the sense and sounds of the gliders retreated. More important, that awful baying diminished. The mist cooled, became thin pellets of ice that bounced off my shoulders, off my soaked hair. In the stillness came the odor of sweat and fear, of panic.
The trees thinned, fir and spruce replacing the leafless oaks and maples. Fine snow sifted through the woods, settling on the needles and undergrowth not covered with the coniferous canopy.
In spite of my efforts, my pace slowed, and the whirring neared. Another pair of hounds bayed, their howling lower, more mournful.
The forest ended, and I stopped, caught by the openness running from left to right, an openness covered with snow. Flat, as though the snow covered pavement or grass, with no sign of undergrowth.
Fifty meters - forty-eight point three meters - to my left a tall silver pillar rose out of the ankle-deep snow, shimmering in the dim light.
A cleared swathe that cut off the tree growth as sharply as a knife or a laser ran east and west - marking the boundary between Rykasha and Dorcha, between civilization and chaos, and, incidentally, added that newly autonomous part of my thoughts, the forty-fourth parallel.
I shivered.
Behind me rose the whining of the pursuit gliders, a sound so faint I could not have heard it a month earlier, a sound so fearsome I would have pushed the idea out of my thoughts a decade earlier. The hounds bayed again.
I glanced back, sensing the approach of three, perhaps more, of the gliders, then looked at the pillar, then downhill to where I knew there was another, and another beyond that - a silver line marking the north boundary of Dorcha and the south boundary of Rykasha, the land of the demons.
Finally, as the whining rose, I shivered once more, then bolted past the boundary and into the land of my damnation.
The snow got deeper as I continued northward, seemingly centimeters higher with each few hundred steps, until I was plodding through knee-deep and clinging heavy white powder that soaked through the thin undertrousers and chilled my legs.
The trees grew farther apart, yet larger, and the mist became a white powder that filtered down from the darkness overhead.
I kept putting one foot in front of the other, glad at least that the whining and whirring of the gliders had been left behind at last. Bitter-glad, doing what duty - and love - required.
As I stepped out into a long empty space, with granite cliffs rising to the left and the right, another sound, more like a whooshing hum, intruded, grew louder by the moment, seemingly coming from no direction and all at once.
I stood still, calf-deep in snow that chilled even my heated body, turning in every direction before looking up ...
Light transfixed me - then darkness.
2
Dzin must be seized with bare hands and open eyes.
Outside the school, the late fall winds carried the fallen leaves past the half-open windows, creating a pleasant rustling. For a moment, rather than concentrate on the sixteen students sitting on their mats before me, I just listened, was just aware, holding to that single Dzin instant, accepting the moment.
Melenda held up her hand.
I nodded. There would be other moments.
'How did Dzin come into the world?' asked the long-haired young woman. 'You tell us about it and teach us how to apply it, but...' Her words trailed off uncertainly.
'Dzin has always been in the world; we just need to discover it.' I smiled. 'That's both true and incomplete. Knowledge of Dzin extends farther than the great collapse. It could have existed long before that. We don't know.' I paused, wondering how to connect what I had said to what we had been discussing. 'What we do know is that Dzin is not like a mountain or a glider repair manual. It is neither an immovable object nor a step-by-step guide to life. It is the way to become aware of reality, not to explain reality or to describe it. That's why we don't spend much time on telling what it is or how it came to be. It is. We try to teach you to become aware of everything, not to explain everything.'
'Is it like the clouds?' Wryan smiled broadly. 'There, but you really can't touch it or feel it?'
'Like the clouds?' I chuckled. 'Not exactly ... although there is an old Dzin saying, "The clouds are in the sky; the water is in the well." But that's another reminder that Dzin teaches us to understand reality directly, without becoming lost in descriptions of descriptions.'
There were several frowns at that, including one from Sergol, the blond fisherman's son in the middle of the second row.
'What's wrong with descriptions?' asked the thin-faced Sirena, squirming slightly on her mat.
We need descriptions to deal with some aspects of our life. Yet we must recognke that while descriptions are necessary, they are only approximations of the world. That was one of the reasons for the downfall of the ancients. The ancients could describe anything. They had descriptions of subatomic particles so small that their most powerful instruments could not detect them, yet they described them. They described how the world was built from the smallest forces, forces so infinitesimal that they could be detected only by interactions created by machines that were as big as the entire city of Henvor.'
The blank looks from the younger children in the second row told me I was well over their heads. I fingered my beard. How could I make what I'd said simpler, yet accurate? 'Dimmel? Do you like chocolate?'
'Yes, Master Tyndel, yes, ser.'
'Tell me about chocolate. What makes it good?'
'It's brown, and it's sweet, and it tastes soooo good.'
I nodded, looking from student face to student face. 'Lycya? Can you taste chocolate from Dimmel's description?'
'No, Master Tyndel.'
I looked at an older face. 'Can you, Erka?'
'No, ser.'
'Can anyone tell me more about chocolate?'
'It has milk and sugars in it,' added Wryan, 'and it melts in your hand on a hot day.'
'How does it taste? How do you feel when you eat it and after you eat it?' I pressed.
'Good ... really good!' exclaimed young Dimmel.
'I'm sure you do.' I paused, letting my eyes sweep over the group. 'Do all these descriptions really tell you how chocolate tastes?'
A few heads shook, then a few more.
'You see how hard it is? And you know about chocolate. The ancients tried to explain things far bigger, far more complicated than chocolate ... Yet for all their explanations, for all their search for more explanations that they could use, they failed, and they perished. As the Abbo Sanhedran said, "Explanation is not awareness."' I paused. 'What does that mean?' I looked toward the end of the first row at Dynae.
Ah, ser ... I am not sure. It wasn't in the lesson,' replied the brunette, the Townkeeper's daughter.
I concealed the wry amusement I felt and looked back at the thin-faced older girl beside her. 'What do you think, Sirena?'
'An explanation ... it doesn't... it's not the same ... as feeling something.'
I nodded. 'That's right. There's more. When you describe something you feel or see, immediately the truth of what you've seen becomes false.'
'Oh ... like the tale of the elephant and the blind men ... except we can't possibly explain everything we see,' interjected the redheaded Wryan. 'So when we talk about it, we leave things out'
'That's part of it,' I agreed.
'And there are things we feel but can't describe, and those get left out, too?' asked Wryan.
'You're right.' I smiled and nodded. 'That's enough for now. I want you all to think about it. We'll take a break before we start physical science.'