CHAPTER 11

            He was still climbing; but the balance between climbing and descending had shifted and he was looking down on the top of each ridge before he came to it.  He was over the broad spine of the range.  Clouds lower down on the northern slope limited his visibility to the next ridge.  He was probably over the poorly defined border and in Kelfar, even though it would still be days before he would have descended to an inhabited area.

            His pace kept getting slower and more deliberate, but the amount of wasted motion kept diminishing as well.  As he came to have fewer and fewer things to do, the attention he devoted to each seemed to increase.  To each action in each day he devoted full, patient attention, enjoying each stage of it, going through it unhurriedly.  He watched small things and found gentle amusement in them, the pattern of a curl of smoke from his fire, the sequence of transformations of color, texture and size the wood went through as it burned, or  the subtle changes of his cooking pot as it dried in the sun; going from dripping wet to damp to dry. 

            He was treating everything with reverence; a desire grew to walk around crushable plants, to avoid even splashing too much water as he crossed a stream.  He wanted to be courteous to the world, to not place even a footprint where it would alter what had already come to pass.

            The country was silent; no not silent, it was without unpurposeful noise.  The birds sang to mark their territory, the creeks babbled as the result of turbulent flow over rocks, occasionally he heard a tree branch fall far up some distant valley but there was no useless noise.  His senses sharpened to these subtle signals, he could distinguish several types of bird calls, and heard them even when they came from deep in the trees on the opposite side of a large meadow.  When a sudden growl from an unseen animal broke an hour's absolute silence, it brought no fright, as if just that moment had been the appropriate time for it.

            He had become sensitive to other signs he had scarcely known existed; he could predict the weather from the size of the bank of clouds at morning.  Even the way grass bent in the face of a wind could be read by him as joyful anticipation of coming warmth or bracing for a cold wind, depending on what it signified.  He had identified no familiar stars in the clear night sky, but he had come to recognize how far the night had gone by the progress of a few bright ones.

            He had made no progress on his questioning of the whys and wherefores of human life, no ideas had sprung into his head as to how all the shouting, discordant voices were to be put together into a harmonious chorus.  His mind, having spun with the question for days without progress had withdrawn from contemplation of it.  Indeed, he had begun to forget human life altogether.  His goal was to save his friends, but he didn't think much about it; to save his friends he had to get home, to get home he had to walk north, to walk north he had to navigate this ridge just here, and that is what he thought about.

            The only patterns he was sensing were natural.  Sometimes he could almost see them, as faint shimmering that vanished when he became aware and tried to look at them.  He felt them, a vast number of interlocking cycles and processes sending pulses of life across the landscape.  There were daily cycles of activity taking their impulse from the alternation of light and dark.  There were annual cycles bringing conception in the fall, birth in the spring, dispersal in the summer.  And there were longer ones, the pulse of an animal's life staring with quick energy, ebbing towards death, the centuries-long surge and ebb of trees over a meadow, the deep, long cycle of mountain building and erosion.

            But these cycles were not static, endlessly repeating from period to period, no, each cycle was different, but within the guidelines of what had come before.  The cycles were of different time and phase, sometimes adding their force to each other, sometimes canceling each other in a complex form like waves bouncing from obstructions in an enclosed, irregular harbor.

            His own life was coming to fit into this pattern, the daily cycles of activity, as well as the longer, single pulse of his life from birth to death.  He wasn't plowing through the waves by brute force, he was dancing along the tops, proceeding in the direction he desired but with minimum expenditure of energy.

            He was lying in his blankets and watching the day end, taking with it the final shades of blue out of the sky, watching the stars appear.  He had completely lost track of how many nights he had done this, but he had never tired of the spectacle.  Slowly the sky would darken, the stars become more intense and he would be asleep.  He was thinking that he was a wealthy man.  There was no amount of money that would have purchased this view.

            Tonight he seemed to be drawn to the sky above him, his consciousness expanding, drifting, his point of view shifting as he fell towards the sky.  He came to with a start and sat up, blankets wrapped about him.  That was an odd feeling, he thought.  He lay back down.  The ground beneath him was smooth, almost a hollow to nestle into.  Nestling into the planet, he thought.  He pictured the planet spinning through space while he lay against it.  He had a momentary vision that he was standing, his back to the planet as it whirled, gravity just strong enough to prevent him being thrown off and flying into space.  Again he came back to reality with a start.

            This time when he relaxed, he fixed his thoughts on local things, the fading warmth of the tea in his stomach, the feel of blankets on his toes, the coldness of his nose, his heartbeat.  It didn't seem to be beating just in response to the needs of his body, it was echoing to the planet's slower rhythm.  He felt he was about to pitch over the edge of an inner precipice and plunge headlong into a new aspect of consciousness.  Again the start, the coming back to reality and he was just a young man wrapped in blankets, alone in the wilderness.

            He rolled over, his face near the ground.  He reached out with his hand and softly scooped up a handful of soil and small pebbles.  He brought it close to his face to examine it in the delicate light of stars.  There was at that moment nothing in his mind at all but the dirt in his hand.  All his faculties were focused on seeing and understanding what it was he was seeing.  Slowly he lowered his hand and let the dirt fall into a pile on the ground.

            He drew his face closer to the tiny pile, cupping his hand around it.  It was as if he had never seen dirt before.  He was seeing every grain separately and the whole together.  And more than seeing, in some way he was understanding it, in sympathy with the earth, feeling its slow life.  He was being drawn in, on the verge of seeing the universe from the inhuman point of view of the earth.  All the layers of interpretation that normally stood between the input of his senses and the experience of his mind were gone.  The universe of the rock came flooding in, not just the pile of dirt in his hand but flowing outward to the earth from where it had come.  He pitched over the edge of the precipice and in the space of an instant had two thoughts:  He became aware of a consciousness so vast, so spread in time that a landslide was a pinprick, the rise and fall of mountains but a breath.  He also became aware of the soft, white glow that enfolded both his palm and the little pile of dirt.  With this realization he came to himself with a jolt.

            He jumped up, throwing off the blankets, and shivered with fright and cold.  What was happening, he thought.  The spell he had been under was not completely broken, for through the soles of his feet came seeping an awareness of the planet.  He started hopping from foot to foot in a futile attempt to avoid the feeling.  But, it seemed so comforting, so understandable and safe in contrast to being a lonely boy hugging himself in the wilderness that wondered why he was resisting it.  He knelt, wanting now to come close again to the earth. 

            His eye was caught by a pebble.  He reached towards it with his arm and his mind.  Again his hand was wrapped by a gentle white light.  This time he put his fright to one side and contemplated his hand.  It was like fire he had seen sometimes in a campfire that was burning low; a small flame would surround a log, and, sustained by a fierce bed of coals, flicker and burn.  Only there was no sensation of heat and while this fire wavered it did so in slow motion or like the surface of a field of grass blowing in a light breeze.

            But the rock.  He continued to reach toward the pebble.  Just before his fingers reached it the fire flowed out from his hand to wrap around the rock.  He picked it up.  He knew the universe of the stone.  He could follow its history back from its current resting place in a fan of dirt, through the flood that had flung it from the stream bed, up the stream bed, past freezing and thawing as it had been part of larger and larger rocks, to the rock face from where it had been driven by the expansion of ice in a crack tens of thousands of winters ago, back to its slow upthurst from underground, back all the way to the root of the planet.

            He put the rock down, exactly where it belonged, feeling dizzy.  Not that there was anything predestined about where this rock had come to rest.  Fragments of the original breakage had been scattered over a wide area, the natural resultant of the vector sum across time of all the forces that had come to act on it.  He was simply been overcome by a desire not to add to that, to place the rock precisely where the natural world had randomly chosen to place it.

            He sat up and held his still glowing hand in front of his face.  He wondered what would happen if he touched his own face with his hand, but enough of the cautious, safety-first engineer remained within this mystical experience to make him decide to wait.  He began to withdraw from the state he was in, but this time it was a gentle disengagement.  He came to himself again, but enough of the peace and understanding was with him that he was not afraid.  "Oh, I want to understand this," he breathed and a small flicker of the flame came between his thumb and forefinger.  With that instant of mysticism amid his cool rational state he came to the certainty that this wasn't a dream, it was real, as real as anything in this world.  He had found his magic, only it was nothing like he had expected.  What did this mean?  What were its properties?  The question tugged gently but insistently at his mind.

            He looked around at the still night.  He had no anxiety to rush to find the answers.  The recent weeks had taught him how much could be accomplished slowly.  For now the vision had burned itself out.  He lay down and went to sleep in just a few heartbeats.

            Later that evening an animal came sniffing its way across the plain where Esgard lay asleep.  He would call this a dog, though it had aspects of the wolf and the coyote in its genes.  The dog was looking for the scent of the smaller mammals it hunted at night when it became aware of a strange smell it and its ancestors had not encountered.  It changed direction and came toward Esgard.  Only as it approached did it become aware of the light ahead.  It stopped and raised its head, considering.  Part of the smell was human and told him to run away; part had no specific reference but was associated with safeness.  He came up within a few feet and examined the sleeping human, now entirely covered with the gentle fire.  Still sensing no danger, the dog came up and sniffed the fire.  The dog decided that enough food had been eaten for the night, this place was secure, and curled up against Esgard and went to sleep.

            When the first light of dawn came into the valley Esgard's sleep cycle was coming up to the stage nearest consciousness.  Some aspect of that was communicated through the gentle flame to erode the dog's feeling of safety.  A sense came to the animal that the man would be startled to find the dog here, and the animal got to its feet and trotted off.  By the time it was halfway across the meadow it had forgotten everything and was concentrating on the morning.

            Dawn and the moment of lightest sleep coincided for Esgard and he awoke smoothly into full consciousness without shock.  He got up refreshed.  He had no disorientation, no feeling that the events of last night were a dream, he remembered exactly what had happened.

            He went nowhere physically that day, needing to explore mental space without the distractions of a shift of physical location.  He could produce the fire on his hand but not on demand, it seemed to happen only when he wasn't expecting it, when he wasn't trying.  But when it happened it was overwhelming.  He had grabbed a bunch of grass and was aware of the myriad processes going on, water and nutrients being pulled up the stems, the evaporation from the stalks, the complex process of photosynthesis.  He had, in his ignorance, pulled the grass out of the ground and been rewarded with a positive shriek of pain coursing up his arm.  He had fallen back as if hit with an electric shock.

            It took two hours after that experience until his arm felt normal and he was able to produce the fire and the understanding again, this time with a young tree, and was overwhelmed by a different set of feelings, all in a slower, longer tempo, like hearing a song played on an oboe where previously had been heard a clarinet.

            That evening by the campfire he contemplated reaching for the fire, but the experiment with the grass reminded him there were depths here he didn't understand.  Again he had a comfortable sleep.

            Days he spent exploring the meadow, moving up side canyons and back again, following rivers, walking the shores of ponds.  Gradually he was drifting in the direction of Kelfar, but not very directly.  The division between the world of ordinary reality and his visionary one was diminishing; he could move smoothly from one to the other.  But he was spending more time in the vision, it was common now to come to and realize he had spent an hour or two clutching a plant and following its life.  The sole visible sign of this inner vision, the soft fire, had also expanded, it would cover his body and spread out over the ground around him.

            He was being overwhelmed with information about the world around him as if he had read every nature, science and math book at once.  He was drowning in sensory data.  One thing he was struck with over and over was how surface simplicity hid a fantastic complexity of interactions and how compromises and tradeoffs determined the ultimate shape of reality around him.  And even the complexity beneath the surface was not all there was.  He would touch a plant, sort out the thousand sensations, focus in on one and have it explode into a thousand separate sensations of its own.  Sometimes he would try to hold the layer of sensations together and go deeper on all of them at the same time till his mind was reeling from awareness of a thousand proteins, ten thousand enzymes and a million chemical reactions at once. 

            In his wanderings one day a new species of shrub caught his eye.  In his now familiar pattern he let the fire enfold the bush and fell into contemplation of the inner activity of the plant.  It was like seeing layer after layer of some model being removed.  Here is the surface ecology of the plant, here the activities inside; here the chemical level; here the atomic.  The bush had berries, but they were poisonous.  The poison was a side effect of the method chosen for reproduction of the plant and a defense mechanism. 

            Maybe he had finally done enough observation, for unlike the hundred previous times he had been made aware of such mixed benefits and problems he wondered why.  Why did the plant have to defend itself, why did a method have to be chosen or randomly happen that would harm another animal?  An intense sadness came over him.  Was such pain inevitable, was it actually woven into the fabric of the universe itself, was there no alternative?  No! his mind screamed, it couldn't be.

            The plant changed.  Its fruit was no longer poisonous to animal metabolism but it still functioned adequately in its other purposes.  He stood, puzzled.  Was this change real or wish fulfillment?  He examined another bush of the same species and found it unchanged, still poison.  He examined the changed bush, it felt different, not poison.  He plucked off a berry and slowly ate it.  It tasted good, and as the minutes went by and he followed the metabolism of the fruit inside his body, he became convinced that there were going to be no side effects.  He had changed the bush.

            One more universe had opened.  His vision was not just information, it was power.  He could alter as well as observe.  He looked at his hand, covered with fire, but it was not the way he looked at it before.  He felt powerful, his hand was now a tool, a lever that he could use to move the world, a weapon to stop those who would oppose him.  He raised his head and extended his arm to the sky.  The fire spread from his hand up his arm and into the sky, rising higher and higher.  The column of flame could be seen for miles if anyone was looking, but he didn't care.  He wasn't a victim now, he was a power that others would have to reckon with, especially the Nakfis.

            He made for his camp.  He would gather it up, and march back to Kelfar on the double.  He had the means now to stop the invasion of Nakfis, to rescue his friends, to do what ever he wanted.

            A squirrel ran across his path.  It reminded him it had been several days since he had eaten any meat.  With easy confidence he directed the light at the animal, stopping it in its tracks.  He communicated security, friendliness.  He encouraged the animal to draw nearer.  He had thought to catch it but now he wondered if he could simply induce it to kill itself.

            The light came recoiling back at him.  The animal cried out and ran off, frantically dodging through the bush at top speed.  He found himself on the ground hearing the animal crashing through the underbrush in the distance.  All vestiges of the flame were gone.  He was angry at being so easily frustrated and he jumped up and tried, like the stereotype of an Old Testament god, to hurl a thunderbolt in the direction of the departing squirrel.  Nothing came.  He strained at raising a flicker.  Nothing.

            Two days later he was lying in bed.  The pain of his accident with the squirrel had faded.  When his anger had gone later in that day the flame had come back and with it his power of understanding.  He let his consciousness expand outward.  The flame spread out in all directions across the meadow, encompassing campfire, grass, and various animals.  Before, he had focused on one plant, one animal.  Now, experience giving greater confidence, he was trying to examine it all.  He had listened to a series of solos, now he was trying to hear the entire symphony.  It was an improvised composition, not one being played in tight coordination.  There was disharmony as well, some notes that didn't combine well with others.  He casually diverted a predator to eating grass and felt the predator's body adjust to the new diet. 

            Another animal came in his vision, a wolf.  This animal was being bothered by fleas, a severe infestation.  The fleas and the wolf were seemingly necessary to each other, but at war with the other.  He personally couldn't see any need for the fleas and he decided to kill them.  Like the incident with the tree, the flame came rolling back at him and he was left with a feeling of having suddenly dropped, like rolling over in bed and having a momentary fear of falling, before he was stopped by the bed.

            He was sweating.  It was becoming obvious that there were limits to this power.  He couldn't harm things with it apparently, and he couldn't just order some change.  It wasn't a force, it wouldn't come when forced, it required some sort of relaxation, a letting go.  If he gave up his own objectives and desires or at least put them on a par with the rest of the world he could do things.  He couldn't hurt or destroy.  He couldn't overrule.  He could only persuade.

            With that understanding, his control increased again and he came to live almost entirely in the vision.  He withdrew more and more from the surface world and saw the world through his vision.  He ate less and less and grew adept at synthesizing what he needed, first from the plants and later from the rocks.  He repaired his clothes by gently persuading the threads to mend themselves.  He disposed of more and more of his possessions; after all what need of tools did he have if he could bend the wood himself, what need of a fire if he could make himself warm, what need of spare clothes if he could alter his as necessary?  He added one possession for reasons he could not explain to himself, a long walking stick which he encouraged a branch to form for him.  It was a wizard's staff he realized, and although there were no stories of such being made here, he felt it was appropriate to have.

            If ordinary eyes had seen him he would have been an inexplicable figure.  A simply clad man carrying a walking stick.  A man seemingly aflame, for the fire danced about him constantly.  A man that seemed to be walking randomly, eccentrically across the meadow.

            The time had come to leave the meadow and put to use what he had learned.  He knelt very carefully and slowly and put his hand flat on the earth.  He sent part of his consciousness into the earth, but this time it was directed, for he had a purpose.  The arrival at the edge of this high plateau meant the final approach to Kelfar, the moment of contact with the world.  He wanted to know what had happened in the world since he had gone on his inward journey.

            He sent his fire into the Earth, but this time he held the boundary of it and did not let all the sensations overwhelm him.  He pushed north across the meadow to the edge of the forest and then into it.  He paused, how far could he go?  He pushed a little farther and realized that he was fine.  Through the northern slope of mountains he went, discerning in passing how he should go to get home.  Reaching the edge of the hills, he went down across sunny, warm fields, and at last to the castle he had first come to on that confused day so long ago when he had stepped out of the river. 

By now it was apparent to him that he couldn’t go on expanding the journey forever, as he pushed forward now, he didn’t get resistance, but the pushing was becoming less and less effective.  He couldn't see the castle, more felt it and the collective mood of its inhabitants; fearful, not totally undivided in purpose, but ready to defend themselves with maximum effort.  He thought he felt Thandar's presence, but it seemed different than what he would have expected.

            An effort would be needed in defense of the castle, for gathering about it like a storm from offshore, was the vanguard of Nakfis' forces.  The first edge of that could be sensed by him along one edge of his awareness. Indeed it looked like nothing so much as a storm front, feeling like angry, arrogant billows of force, piling up to the west of the castle, gathering strength for a decisive battle.  Slowly he withdrew from the awareness and came to, realizing that his heart was racing and he was breathing hard.

            He relaxed, telling himself that he was fine.  There was one more journey to go on.  He cast his attention east along the spine of the ridge, east to Nakfis.  His awareness could go as his thoughts took it, as long as he went slowly.  As he crossed the border, there was a coldness, a foreboding that penetrated even the earth of that land and so penetrated his consciousness.  As he went farther east, the darkness was concentrating.  He was focusing in on the center to the coldness, the point of organization to the evil.  This center was not the capital city of that military and violent land but a point still farther east and farther up in the mountains.  As his mind drew near, he felt, in the dark center of the place, at the very center of the source of orders and ideas that had again and again laid waste the region, a lightening, a warming.  What did this mean, was there good at the center of evil, was this evil just misguided good?

            He pushed his mind on again and the vision clarified.  That ball of innocence surrounded by malice was not quite at the center.  He pushed again, and it focused as two points, one brighter, one dimmer.  It was, he finally realized, his friends.  Bars and Sonjar were alive after all.  The brighter point now began to move, to expand, it was coming to him, surrounding him.  Suddenly he was back in the carriage, and she was there, light pouring from her smile, and now he was back in the castle following each highlight in every strand of her long blond hair.  He was in the camp, the last camp before they were separated.  He was watching Sonjar as she bent over in attending to a campfire.  She straightened, turned to him, and raised her hand.  Something bright came at him from her raised palm.  And Esgard was communicating with her, or rather, it was as if he had already communicated.  She and Bars were alive, but in pain.  They were being toyed with by powers far stronger than they, but however serious the strain on their sanity, they were alive and physically well.

            He pulled back to the meadow and gazed with normal eyes on the slope before him.  Had he actually talked with her, and what had he communicated to her?  Hope, his presence, a contact, energy, or so he hoped.  There was something complete about that instant of contact, as if it had lasted eons.  And what in the world did it mean that Sojar did that and Bars did not do it.  Was she an active participant in this communication, or was that just how he experienced it?  Questions that would have to wait to find an answer.

            He withdrew to himself again.  His friends in captivity were in a weakened state but a stable one; the focus of Nakfis malevolence was on Kelfar.  That land, while relatively unhurt so far, was threatened by forces it wasn't fully aware of and would not survive without help.

            He thought he could provide the difference, and so set off down the mountain to Kelfar.

            (Last page - chapter 11)