Which was a problem I had never considered before: when you only have weapons that kill, and none that merely injure, then it may come to pass that your weapons are of no value at all. And so you must huddle within your ship for safety, though you are almost as powerful as gods and your attackers are little more than beasts.
“When we had arrived at the Summit,” she went on, “we had frightened them away for the moment—perhaps because they thought we were the vanguard of a large army. But we were aware that very likely they would resume the attack before long, now that they saw how few we really were. And soon they will.”
That seemed to be all that she had to say to us. She thanked us for bringing back the body of their colleague; and then she and her two companions went back inside their ship, leaving us bereft and empty on this cold pebbled plain where the palaces of our gods were not to be found.
“There you are,” Thrance said, in the harshest of voices. “There you have it. Gods! What gods? There are no gods up here. There are only these monsters! And we are fools!” And he spat into the air.
“Be quiet,” Kilarion said to him.
Thrance turned to him and laughed, in that way of his that was like the scraping of metal against metal. “Are you upset, Kilarion? Yes, yes, I suppose you are. Who wouldn’t be? To climb all this way and find that your gods are nothing but a pack of dirty debased beasts no better than a bunch of rock-apes?”
“Quiet, Thrance!” Kilarion said again, with real menace in his voice.
I thought that they would fight. But Thrance only meant to goad; there was not even enough honor in him to follow through on his goading. Kilarion rose halfway and seemed about to spring upon him, and Thrance grinned and made a placating bow, practically touching his head to the ground, and said in a high, piping, infuriating voice, mockingly pathetic, “No offense meant, Kilarion! No offense! Don’t hit me! Please don’t hit me, Kilarion!”
“Let him be, Kilarion,” Galli muttered. “He isn’t worth wasting your effort on.”
Kilarion subsided, grumbling and murmuring to himself.
Thrance wasn’t finished, though. He said, “Do you know, once upon a time I was told that it was like this up here? That was when I was in a Kingdom called Mallasillima, on the border of the Lake of Fire. Some people of this Kingdom had been to the top and had seen the gods, so they said, and they told me what they were like. I thought they were lying to me, that they were inventing it all; but then the notion came to me that it might just be the truth, and I decided then and there that I would find some way of coming up here and seeing it myself. And now I have. Now I have seen with my own eyes that the tales that they told me in Mallasillima were true after all. Imagine! No gods! All a myth, all a lie! Nothing here but a bunch of degenerate—”
“Enough, Thrance,” I said.
“What’s the matter, Poilar? Can’t you face a little reality?”
But my despair had returned blacker and deeper even than before, and it had numbed me in my heart and in my mind so that I could make no answer to him.
Kilarion, seeing I was silent, rose again and went to Thrance and stood above him. “If you weren’t such a coward,” he said, “I’d teach you a little about reality. But Galli’s right. I shouldn’t soil my hands on you.”
“No, you shouldn’t,” Thrance said. “If you touch me, I might just change you into something that looks exactly like me. I can do that, you know. But you wouldn’t like to look like me, eh, Kilarion? Or would you? Would you?”
I went over to Thrance and moved between him and Kilarion, pushing Kilarion back a little way, and said to Thrance, “Listen to me. If you speak another word now, it’ll be your last. Is that clear?” Thrance bowed again, almost as deeply and just as contemptuously as he had bowed to Kilarion, and looked up into my face and said with his lips alone, not his voice, No offense, Poilar! No offense!
I turned my back on him.
To the others I said, “Let’s start setting up our camp.”
“Camp?” Naxa asked. “Are we staying here?”
“At least for tonight,” I replied.
“Why? What for?”
I gave him no answer. I had no answer. I was utterly bewildered, a leader without a plan. My mind was empty, my soul was empty. The whole purpose of my life had collapsed away from me. If what the Irtimen had said were true—and how could I deny it?—there were no gods, the Summit was inhabited by monsters, the Pilgrimage to which I had devoted half my life had been a hollow meaningless endeavor. I would have wept, but they were all watching me; and I think in any case this air that was hardly air at all had taken the capacity to weep away from me. I did not know what to do. I did not know what to think. Thrance, jeering mocker that he was, had spoken the truth: we were face to face with reality now—not a reality that we had expected to find, and it was a hard one to confront.
But I was still leader. I could continue to lead, even if I had no idea why, or toward what end. And possibly I would yet come to find—as even within the depths of my despair some small part of me still fiercely believed—that there are gods here somewhere, that the Summit was indeed the holy place we had thought it to be.
“We’ll sleep over here,” I said, indicating a little declivity that was sheltered somewhat from the raking Summit winds by a low outcropping of crumbled rock. I set Thissa to work casting a spell of protection. I sent Galli and Grycindil off to search for such firewood as this forlorn place might yield, and Naxa and Maiti to hunt out a spring or pond of fresh water. Kilarion, Narril, and Talbol I appointed as the first patrol, to march up and down in a wide circle along the open zone beyond the Irtiman starship and keep watch for any stirrings among the “gods.” For so I thought of them still, those beastlike things—the degenerate children of the gods, perhaps, but gods of a sort all the same.
Traiben said, “Do you have any work for me just now? Because if you don’t, I’d like to do a little scouting on my own.”
“What kind of scouting? Where?”
He nodded toward the ruined ship of the ancient Irtimen.
“I want to see what’s inside it,” he said. “Whether there are Irtiman things there—holy things remaining from the old days, things the Irtimen might have fashioned back in the time when they still really were gods—” And I saw a gleam in Traiben’s eyes that I knew only too welclass="underline" the gleam that was the outward manifestation of that hunger of his to learn, to know, to poke his nose into every mystery the World had to offer.
It occurred to me that if ever we returned to the village—though whether we ultimately would or not, I could not say; I still had no plan, no sense of anything beyond the needs of the moment—we might indeed want to bring with us some tangible sacred object, something that had felt the touch of the gods, the true gods who had lived on this mountaintop in the days before their decline had begun. But it dismayed me to think of Traiben going into that tumbled mass of rusting girders and twisted metal sheeting by himself as night was beginning to descend. Who knew what skulking “gods” he might encounter in the darkness? I would not let him have permission to go. He begged and pleaded, but I refused to yield. It was madness, I said, for him to risk his life over there. Tomorrow, I told him, a larger group of us might investigate it, if it seemed safe then to make the attempt.
Dusk was coming on. The dark sky grew darker. The stars came forth, and a single icy moon. The Irtiman starship cast a long sharp shadow that reached almost to my feet. I stood by myself, staring somberly across the plain at the place where the miserable creatures whom we had hoped would be our gods were hidden.
Hendy came up to me. Transformed as she was, she towered over me by a head and a half, though she seemed as filmy as a ghost. Fleshless as she was now, she must be freezing in this bitter cold; but she showed no sign of discomfort. She put her hand lightly on my arm.