He looked away, shuddering, his face filled with pain and a strange, hitherto untasted shame, then looked back again. They were talking among themselves now, their crude, half-savage speech suddenly foreign to his ear. It made him feel uneasy, as if he had knowledge of something better, some long-buried memory of things before the tribe. Across from him Tek and Rotfoot exchanged halfhearted blows in savage-gentle play, their broken faces filled with light and shadows. He lifted his head, sniffing at them in instinct, then settled, realizing what he was doing, filled with a sudden, intense sense of self-disgust.
For a moment he closed his eyes, feeling the warmth on his face and arms and chest. That, too, was strange. It was rare to have a fire. Rare to sit as they sat now, the circle of the dark behind, the circle of the light in front. But this was a special time.
Baxi sat in his place, on a huge, rounded stone above the others. A stack of wood—itself a kind of treasure—lay at his side. From time to time he would reach down and throw a piece upon the blaze, growling with pleasure.
They had found the sacks of firewood in a storeroom in the conquered settlement; three of them, hidden beneath a pile of other things scavenged from the dump. Baxi had brought them back and built the fire himself with a care that made Kim think he had seen it done before. Then he had gone down to his cellar, returning moments later with the fire-stick.
Kim had watched them all gasp and fall back as the flame leapt from his hand and spread among the gathered wood, muttering darkly between themselves, their eyes filled with fear and fascination. But Kim had known. He had crouched there, still and silent, watching as the fire kindled, like some strange living creature jumping from one dark surface to another, consuming all it touched. Like the unspoken thoughts in his head, he realized. Yet this had a voice, a crackling, popping, sputtering voice, its breath strangely thick and dark, curled like a beard, yet evanescent—vanishing into the dark above the blaze.
For a brief moment it seemed he understood; held in his head a key to the pattern of all things. Then it, too, was gone, drawn up into the darkness overhead.
He felt misplaced. Torn from the light and cast down into darkness. But if misplaced, what then? How could he change things?
Run away, a small voice inside him called out. Run far away. To a place where the darkness ends,
He looked out beyond the fire, blinded by its brilliance, seeing nothing but the afterimage of the flames. The darkness was unending and eternal. There was nothing but the darkness. . . .
No, he reminded himself. Not true. There is a place of brightness. Up there. A wartha.
Among the gods.
Not only that, but there was a way. A single door into the brightness. A one-way door that often led to death, or so the men said. A door that only the youngest and the bravest took.
Kim looked down at his hands again. He was young, but was he brave enough? Was he prepared to risk everything on a single gamble?
He thought of the escapade with the mirror and the fire-stick and his spirits rose. Then the image of himself, scared and cowering on the rocks, came back to him. His stomach knotted. He wanted it. Wanted the brightness like he wanted life itself. But he was afraid. Dreadfully, awfully, numbingly afraid. He felt he could not do it—would die before he took the first step.
Better to stay here a thousand years. . . .
A cold shiver passed through him, ice beneath the firelight on his face and chest and limbs. No, not that. Death was preferable to that.
He looked up. On the far side of the fire, beyond Rotfoot, stood Baxi, watching him. For a moment their eyes met and locked and some kind of raw understanding passed between them. And in the moment before he looked away, Kim saw a crude kind of affection there in the older man's eyes: a strange, almost wistful tenderness that he found unsettling.
Far away, said the voice inside. To a place where the darkness ends.
Kim rose and turned to face the darkness. The heat lay on his naked back, like the promise of comfort, but now his face was cold and the tension in him was worse than it had ever been. For a moment longer he hesitated, need and fear at war within him. Then, with a violent shudder, he nodded to himself and jerked away from the fire, his decision made.
He would go. Now. Before the darkness took him back.
THE sign was ancient. Time had turned the whiteness of its paint a mottled gray, had faded the dark, heavy lettering.
Where the bolts held it to the wall a red-gold rust had formed two weeping eyes.
Kim looked up at it, struggling to understand. Like so much else it was a mystery; a symbol of all the things denied him. He studied the strange yet familiar shapes of the letters, wondering what they meant, filling the gap, the darkness of incomprehension, with his own meanings. The first letter was easy. It was an arrow, facing to the left. There was a gap and then the second, its double curves facing away from the arrow like a straight-backed woman's breasts. The third was a ring. The fourth a drawn bow. The fifth? Two steep hills, perhaps, linked by a valley. The sixth again was easy. It was an upright column, like the column beyond the wall. The seventh? He felt the seventh was like the fifth, yet its difference—its lack of an upright strut—was significant. A gate, maybe. Or two interlocking flints—perhaps the sign for war. Then, after another gap, came the last of them; an eye with a dark, curled eyebrow overhead, linked at the eye's left corner.
But what did it mean in total? What message had it once conveyed?
He looked about him, then ducked beneath the rotten lintel, pushing through the gap in the wall. There, like some vast subterranean serpent breaching the far wall of the ruined building, stood the column, its silvered surface gleaming in the half-light.
Kim stumbled forward and stood before it, his eyes drawn upward to where it met the ceiling of the Clay far overhead. There were many such pillars spread regularly throughout the Clay, but this one, Kim knew, was slightly different from the others. It was a gate. An entrance into the Above.
Long ago they had chased a boy from another tribe across the nearby hills and trapped him here, between the walls of this old, ruined building. Faced with certain death, the boy had turned, gone to the pillar, and pressed his hands against it.
Miraculously the pillar had opened. A narrow aperture had formed in its perfect roundness, a dim, fierce light burning out from the space within. Fearfully, with a backward glance at them, the boy had gone inside. At once the opening had closed,
throwing the space between the walls into an intense and sudden darkness.
They had camped there some while, waiting for the boy to come out, but he never had. And when one of the older boys grew brave enough to approach the pillar and press against it, they could all see that the space inside was empty.
It had eaten the boy.
For a time he had believed this version of events, and in truth part of him still believed it, making him cower there, terrified to enter. But the newly woken part of him reasoned otherwise. What if the boy had not been killed? What if he had been taken up into the Above?
They were huge assumptions. Hunches, not certainty. And the boy had gone inside only because he had had no option. But what of himself? There were no knives awaiting him should he turn away. Only the darkness. Only the fetid Clay.
He grimaced and closed his eyes, tormented by indecision. He didn't want to die. He didn't want to be wrong.
Is death any worse than this?
The thought came like a voice in his head, and with the voice came the realization that he was no longer a single creature. There were two of him, sharing a single skull, a single body. One dark, one light. One kept him here, the other craved escape. Here, at the gate to the Above, they would have to fight it out between them.