It was as though a vast step had been cut into the side of Calf Mountain. Flapping Eagle, appreciating the mountain’s true shape for the first time, found himself imagining a giant, using the island as a step up from sea to sky. On the flat horizontal of the step lay the town of K, hard up against the renewed mountain-wall. Fields took up the rest of the plain, some with herds of cattle, others of sheep; still others grew wheat and other crops. But it was night now and the fields were still. Farmhouses dotted the plain, glowing like worms in a garden.
Above the town, on an outcrop of the mountain, stood a single house. Its walls, in direct opposition to the whitewash uniform worn by the rest of the town, were black as jet. It was invisible now, showing no lights; but Virgil Jones knew it was there. It was Liv’s house.
Above it, the mountain’s peak was hidden in a wall of cloud.
– It never lifts, said Virgil Jones, and then silence resumed.
Flapping Eagle had not forgotten his vow to himself in that inner dimension; he would abandon his search and make his life here, if he could. So here was an end to centuries of wandering, a methuselah age of following blindly where the moving finger led. He should have felt relief; but only tension came. For any man, it is a hard thing to empty the mind of all its aims and substitute a new set, cleanly, just so; for Flapping Eagle, whose aims had been set, like one of those inner dimensions, for seven hundred years, it was an herculean task.
Virgil Jones, too, was making plans, and plans which involved Flapping Eagle at that. For now, now that he had brought Flapping Eagle to K, was the crucial time. If he should react to it (and it to him) as Virgil hoped, he would be ready for the task Virgil wished him to perform. If not, then there was nothing to be done. Virgil no longer had the strength to approach Grimus. He had had a glimpse of it, there in the forest; but it had been ruined once more, in his struggle with the Gorf. Now it was up to Flapping Eagle. Virgil derived some dark amusement from the fact that he was planning exactly what Deggle would have wished; that would amuse Master Nicholas, too, if he knew. If there were no god, we should have to invent one, remembered Virgil, and made this reversal of that aphorism:
since there is a Grimus, he must be destroyed.
This, then, was a return to a long-lost war. There would be O’Toole to face, and possibly even Liv. But there was no going back.
– Flapping Eagle, he said, I’d like to tell you this: we are all most vulnerable to the ones we love.
Flapping Eagle was only half-listening. Virgil went on, gazing into the night-mist lying lightly over the plain, giving the town itself a shimmering, insubstantial air.
– I mean yourself, said Virgil. I hope you will not end by causing me pain. I really am very vulnerable to any wounds you may care to inflict. That, it appears to me, is what a friendship means.
Flapping Eagle was listening now. Virgil had spoken haltingly; the words had been hard to say. They were a plea for help, a cry of need from a man who had now saved his life twice.
– Agreed, he said. Virgil nodded briefly.
They had been at the woods’ end for some time now. Night was well under way.
– Well, said Virgil Jones, shall we?
On an impulse, Flapping Eagle linked his left arm around Virgil’s right; and they marched, in step, comrades-in-arms, towards their separate dooms.
The moon, filtering faintly through the mist, shed white flecks on their moving heads.
PART TWO. TIMES PAST
XXXI Stones
K BY NIGHT: houses huddling together as though clustered for protection, drawing warmth from each other. Rough exteriors, stained by damp and mist and time, dirty-whitewash crudities, architectural cripples, surviving defiantly for all their crooked tiles and ill-fitting doors.
Around the houses, the streets. Lifelines of dust, eddying and swirling among the deformed homes, coming from nowhere, circling aimlessly, existence itself their only purpose. A place must have streets; blank spaces between the filled-up holes.
One street, and only one, could hold its head high. An avenue of cobbles bifurcating the eddies of dust, it stalked through the night town from end to end, proclaiming its seniority, a roman among barbarians.
A man, decrepit as his clothes, stained as the houses, dusty as the streets, on all fours, crawling the length of this majestic thoroughfare, a pilgrim on the road to Rome, engaged for all appearances in an act of worship.
This was Stone; he answered to no other name and rarely enough to his chosen soubriquet. Silence was his way, the road his hill and the stones the stones of Sisyphus. He counted them daily, one by one, enumerating the cobbles for posterity. A task without end for a man with a poor memory, an infinite series of numbers without a sum. At first, so long ago that he had forgotten, he had tried; his parched tongue would stumble over the large, ungainly figures; they would slip his mind; and patiently he would return to the beginning. Now the counting was only an excuse; his real purpose was the constant renewal of his friendship with each single stone. He greeted them like old friends, coming with pleasure across a favourite cracked cobble here, a particularly round and pleasing one there. To some of them he gave names; others were the scenes of great adventures in his dreams. The street was his microcosm and afforded him all his delights and pains. Small and attenuated, he was as much a part of the road as any of his stones. In one of his rare sorties into the spoken word he had said earnestly to Elfrida Gribb, wife of Ignatius Q. Gribb, the town thinker, -If it weren’t for me the road would crumble. Stones need love as much as you. And in a practical sense he did protect the road, guarding it zealously against the onslaughts of dust from the side-streets, and against the injuries of animals on its progress through the fields. He washed it and nurtured it, It was his. In return for this labour of love, he was fed by whomever he was nearest to when hungry and housed by whomever he was nearest to when tired. It was his road along which Virgil Jones and Flapping Eagle made their way into the ill-made community.
As they passed the occasional farmhouse, Flapping Eagle felt his pulse quicken. Lights glowed in windows through thin curtains, warm islands where a traveller might shelter. He glanced eagerly at Virgil and was about to voice his new-found exhilaration; but his companion’s face was clouded and immobile. It was a time to keep one’s peace: Flapping Eagle restrained the bubbling enthusiasm within him.
Home: that was the word that had done it. It crept into his head as he stood looking at the town from the breaking waves of the forest. It had come announced, filtering into him on a shaft of light from the distant windows. Home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill. Flapping Eagle was coming home, to a town where he had never lived. He saw home in the mist lying softly over the fields; he scented it in the perfume-laden night; he felt it in the cobbles; but most of all it was the windows that were home, the closed eyes of a protected life, glowing with contentment, the closed windows.
Flapping Eagle stopped for a moment. Virgil looked at him curiously, and then, unknowingly, returned his compliment: restraining his words, which would have been an intrusion.
The farmhouse stood at the side of the road. It was long and low and white. No doubt animals were sleeping in the shed; it was the closed window that had transfixed Flapping Eagle. People were moving behind it, lives were being led. Abruptly, he vaulted the gate and crept up to the yellow light. Virgil Jones stood in the road, watching.
Slowly, Flapping Eagle raised himself from the ground to look through the glass; and found himself staring into an unblinking granite face. The farmer must have drawn back the curtains just as Flapping Eagle looked in. It was a face filled with crevices; deep valleys and pocks scarred it, but the eyes were strong and showed no anger or astonishment. They stared through Flapping Eagle as though he wasn’t there. Shaken, mumbling wordless apologies, he backed away to the gate, the road and Virgil, who fell into step beside him. They walked away from the stone face in the window and Flapping Eagle discovered that his hands were quivering. The eyes had done it: they had told him that he was still pariah. The untouchable.