“I guess so. How do we get up there?”
“There’s stairs, concealed with fiendish cleverness,” the lordling replied.
“Here,” said Willowspear, pointing, and after Smith had looked for a moment, he spotted them: rough steps cut out of the rock, angled in such a way as to be nearly invisible in the crazy-swirled colors in the strata. They moved up at a steep angle. There were no handholds, nor any rail that Smith could see.
“Boys, you’ll wait here,” Lord Ermenwyr told his bodyguard. They nodded gloomily and stood to attention on the deck.
“What about this threat we’re rescuing your sister from?” Smith inquired. “Wouldn’t they be useful if we have to fight somebody?”
Lord Ermenwyr checked his reflection in a pocket mirror. “I have to admit, Smith, I may have exaggerated just the tiniest bit about the amount of danger Svnae is in,” he said. “It’s actually more sort of an awfully embarrassing fix, to be honest.”
“I see,” said Willowspear, in tones of ice.
“No, you don’t, and don’t go all peevish on me like that!” said Lord Ermenwyr. “All will be revealed in good time. For now let’s just mind our own little businesses and obey our liege lord, shall we?”
He started up the stairs. After looking at each other a moment, Smith and Willowspear sighed and followed him.
They climbed steadily for several minutes, as the stairs zigzagged first left and then right, but Smith was unable to spot anything resembling a doorway or even a cave mouth.
“Can’t imagine who carved out all these fiendishly concealed stairs,” he grumbled, “unless it was one of us poor benighted Children of the Sun. We’re so clever with little engineering feats like this.”
“Oh, shut up,” said Lord Ermenwyr, gasping for breath. He leaned on the wall at a slightly wide place and motioned them past him. “Go on, damn you. But you’ll wait at the top until I get there! I get to knock on the door.”
“I have had an epiphany, Smith,” said Willowspear, as they ascended.
“Really?” Smith panted.
“There is a parable the Lady tells. I will translate it for you. The trevani Luvendashyll is traveling through the forest, he comes to a village, he sees a woman lamenting. ‘How can I help you?’ he asks her, ‘What is wrong?’ and she says, he thinks she says, ‘Oh, kind sir, I need wisdom!’
“He says, ‘My child, you must travel a long road to find wisdom, for it is not easy to get. You must struggle, and suffer, and speak to all you meet and study their ways, learn what is in their hearts; and even then you will only have begun to find wisdom,’ and the woman says back, ‘No, no, that can’t be right! Can’t you give me wisdom?’
“And Luvendashyll says, ‘I have a little wisdom, my child, but it cannot be given so easily. You would have to become my disciple, and give all you owned to those who are less fortunate than you are, and travel with me to the ends of the earth, and hear me disputing with other trevanion; and perhaps in twenty years I could give you a little wisdom. Or it may be that the wisdom of other trevanion would seem better, and you might leave me and apprentice yourself to them for a score of years, in order that they might give you wisdom.’
“And the woman is angry, she says, ‘That’s ridiculous! Why should I have to do all that to get a little wisdom?’ So Luvendashyll is offended, and he says, ‘Impatient woman! You do not know what I had to go through for the wisdom I possess. I studied with my master from my earliest childhood, for his wisdom. I spent many days lying in a dark place listening to the Seven Stories of Jish, repeating them for my master until I knew them by heart, to obtain his wisdom. I fasted and prayed and stood on one leg in the bitter cold of winter, that I might be worthy of his wisdom. I walked on cinders and scored my back with a knotted thong, and yet in the end I was granted a little wisdom only, for my master did not like to part with his great wisdom.’
“And the woman says, ‘Look, all I want is wisdom, because the one I have has a hole in it and my acorns keep falling out!’ ”
“Huh?” said Smith.
“The trevani Luvendashyll has misunderstood the woman,” Willowspear explained. “It’s a funny story in Yendri, because he thinks she has asked him for wisdom, trev’nanori, when all along she asked only for a new basket, ’tren atnori’e.”
“Oh,” said Smith.
“And your confusion adds a further dimension to the parable, because you don’t speak Yendri in the first place,” said Willowspear, taking great strides upward in his enthusiasm. “And for the first time, I see the hidden meaning in it!”
“I never thought it was all that funny,” said Lord Ermenwyr sullenly, struggling along behind them. “I mean, so the trevani is deaf, so what? Or maybe the woman is missing a few teeth.”
“The point is that the woman needed a simple thing,” said Willowspear, “but the trevani did not comprehend simplicity, and so he wasted her time—” He scrambled up on a wide flat landing, and turned back to pull Smith after him, “wasted her time with advice, when what he ought to have done was simply taken reeds and made her a basket! And I, Smith, will make baskets for your people. Figuratively speaking.”
He pulled Lord Ermenwyr up as well, and turned to gesture triumphantly at the shoulder of the mountain they had just reached. “When we go up there, Smith, we will look out upon the Garden of Rethkast, and I will show you your future.”
“All right,” said Smith. He plodded after Willowspear flat-footed, envying the younger man his energy.
“The door is this way,” Lord Ermenwyr shouted after them, pointing to a cave.
“One moment, my lord,” Willowspear promised. He scrambled up to the crest. “Now, Smith behold the—”
Smith climbed up beside him and stood, gazing down at the wide valley below the mountain. He frowned. Regular lines of green, stretching to the near horizon…
“Those are tents,” he pointed out.
“But that was—” began Willowspear, and his eyes widened in horror as he saw the piled mounds of cut trees far below, that which had been the bowers of Rethkast, fast yellowing.
Smith was distracted by a slight sting in his foot. He shifted his weight in annoyance, thinking to kick the wasp away. How had he been stung through his boot? He looked down and saw the tuft of green feathers sticking in his foot, and father down the mountain the Yendri who had shot him, clinging to a precarious handhold. There were others below him, like a line of ants scaling a wall.
He had a rock in his hand before he knew what he was doing, and had hurled it down into the Yendri’s glaring face. There was some sort of horrific and spectacular chain reaction then, but he didn’t have time to notice it much, because yanking the dart out of his boot took all his concentration. Then Willowspear pulled him away from the edge, and they were staggering back the way they’d come. Lord Ermenwyr was at his elbow suddenly, dragging him into the cave.
There was a dark passage running into the heart of the mountain, but not far, because they came at once to a sealed door. Lord Ermenwyr was pounding on it, yammering curses or prayers. Smith could hear Willowspear weeping behind him.
There was a calm voice in Smith’s head saying: Some of the poison may have stayed in the leather of your boot, and after all you survived a much stronger dose, once before, and there is always the possibility you’ve built up some immunity. On the other hand…
But he was still conscious. He was still on his feet, though events had begun to take on a certain dreamlike quality. For example: When the door opened at last, he beheld the biggest woman he’d ever seen in his life.