He lived in a hut on the side of a mountain. Often he would climb to the peak and look down into the valley. His red sandals were drops of blood upon the snow of the peak.
In the valley people lived and died. He watched them.
He saw the clouds that drifted over the peak. The clouds took strange shapes. At times they were ships or castles or horses. More often they were strange things never seen by anyone save him, and he had seen them only in his dreams. Yet in the strange shapes of drifting clouds he recognized them.
Standing alone in the doorway of his hut, he always watched the sun spring from the dew of earth. In the valley they had told him that the sun did not rise but that the earth was round like an orange and turned so that every morning the burning sun seemed to leap into the sky.
He had asked them why the earth revolved and why the sun burned and why they did not fall from the earth when it turned upside down. He had been told that it was so today because it had been so yesterday and the day that was before yesterday, and because things never changed. They could not tell him why things never changed.
At night he looked at the stars and at the lights of the valley. At curfew the lights of the valley vanished, but the stars did not vanish. They were too far to hear the curfew bell.
There was a bright star. Every third night it hung low just above the snow-covered peak of the mountain, and he would climb to the peak and talk to it. The star never replied.
He counted time by the star and by the three days of its progress. Three days made a week. To the people of the valley, seven days made a week. They had never dreamed of the land of Saarba where water flows upstream, where the leaves of trees burn with a bright blue flame and are not consumed, and where three days make a week.
Once a year he went down into the valley. He talked with people, and sometimes he would dream for them. They called him a prophet, but the small children threw sticks at him. He did not like children, for in their faces he could see written the evil that they were to live.
It has been a year since he had last been to the valley, and he left his hut and went down the mountain. He went to the market and talked to people, but no one spoke to him or looked at him. He shouted but they did not reply.
He reached with his hand to touch a market woman upon the shoulder to arrest her attention, but the hand passed through the woman’s shoulder and the woman walked on. He knew then that he had died within the past year.
He returned to the mountain. Beside the path he saw a thing that lay where once he had fallen and had risen and walked on. He turned when he reached the doorway of his hut, and saw the people of the valley carrying away the thing which he had passed. They dug a grave in the earth and buried the thing.
The days passed.
From the doorway of his hut he watched the clouds drift by the mountain. The clouds took strange shapes. At times they were birds or swords or elephants. More often they were strange things never seen save by him. He had dreamed of seeing them in the land of Saarba where bread is made of stardust, where sixteen pounds make an ounce, and where clocks run backward after dark.
Two women climbed the mountain and walked through him into the hut. They looked about them.
—They be nothing here, said the elder of the women. —Where might be his sandals, I ken not.
—Go ye back, said the younger woman. —Late it grows. Come sunrise, I will find they.
—Be ye not afraid?
—The shepherd cares for his sheep, said the young woman.
The older woman trudged down the path into the valley. Darkness fell, and the younger lighted a candle. She seemed afraid of the darkness.
He watched her, but she saw him not. Her hair, he saw, was black as night, and her eyes were large and lustrous, but her ankles were thick.
She removed her garments and lay upon the bed. In sleep, she tossed uneasily, and the blanket slipped to the floor. The candle still burned upon the table.
The light of the candle flame fell upon a small black crucifix that lay in the white hollow between her breasts. It rose and fell.
He heard the curfew bell and knew that it was time to go to the top of the peak, for it was the third night.
Upon the mountain had descended a storm. The wind shrieked about the hut but the woman did not awaken.
He went out into the storm. The wind was cruel as never before. The hand of fear gripped his heart. Yet the star was waiting.
The cold grew more intense, the night blacker. A blanket of snow drifted over the mountain, covering the spot where he fell.
In the morning the woman found the red sandals in the thawing snow and took them back to the valley.
—A strange dream I had, said the elder woman. —A man writhed on a cross.
The younger woman crossed herself. —The Christus?
—Not, said the elderly woman. —Shouted he about Saarba and oblivion.
—I ken them not, said the younger woman. —They be no such places.
—That shouted he, said the elder. —Remember I now.
—La, laughed the younger woman. —Dreams be only dreams. Things what be be and things what be not be not.
—So, said the elder. She shrugged.
Clouds take strange shapes. At times they are wagons or swans or trees. More often they are strange things never seen save in the land of Saarba.
Clouds are impersonal. They drift by an empty peak as readily.
BEAR POSSIBILITY
If you’ve ever seen an expectant father pacing the waiting room of a hospital lighting cigarette after cigarette—usually at the wrong end if it’s a filter-tip—you know how worried he acts.
But if you think that that is worry, take a look at Jonathan Quinby, pacing the room outside a delivery room. Quinby is not only lighting the wrong ends of his filter-tips but is actually smoking them that way, without tasting the difference.
He’s really got something to worry about. It had started when they had last visited a zoo one evening. «Last visited» is true in both senses of the phrase; Quinby would never go within miles of one again, ever, nor would his wife. She had fallen, you see, into—
But there is something that must be explained, so you may understand what happened that evening. In his younger days Quinby had been an ardent student of magic—real magic, not the slight-of-hand variety. Unfortunately charms and incantations did not work for him, however effective they might be for others.
Except for one incantation, one that let him change a human being into any animal he chose and (by saying the same incantation backward) back again into a human being. A vicious or vengeful man would have found this ability useful, but Quinby was neither vicious nor vengeful and after a few experiments—with subjects who had volunteered out of curiosity—he had never made use of it.
When, ten years ago at the age of thirty, he had fallen in love and married, he had used it once more, simply to satisfy his wife’s curiosity. When he had told her about it, she had doubted him and challenged him to prove it, and he had changed her briefly into a Siamese cat. She had then made him promise never to use his supernormal ability again, and he had kept that promise ever since.
Except once, the evening of their visit to the zoo. They had been walking along the path, with no one in sight but themselves, that led past the sunken bear pits. They’d looked for bears but all of them had retired into the cave portion of their quarters for the night. Then—well, his wife had leaned a little too far over the railing; she lost her balance and fell into a pit. Miraculously, she landed unhurt.
She was getting to her feet and looking up at him; she put her finger to her lips and then pointed to the entrance to the den. He understood; she wanted him to get help but quietly, lest any sound might waken the sleeping bear in its den. He nodded and was turning away when a gasp from his wife made him look down again—and see that it would be too late to get help.