Dormia (36 page)

"We'll be in Somnos soon," said Spack with a smile. "And I'll be welcomed—I mean, we'll
all
be welcomed—like heroes. Well, not this big oaf of a leaf-burner, Bilblox. You'll see what Dormians think of leaf-burners..."

"Noo," replied a still-woozy Alfonso. "There'll be no mention of leaf-burning—not a single bad word about Bilblox—or I'll see to it that there isn't so much as a park bench erected in your honor."

Spack sighed indignantly, but said nothing.

Alfonso kept quiet. He was too woozy to speak. In the
distance, through the gloom of the tunnel, he could see a small patch of the night sky and the glow of moonlight.

"We're almost there!" exclaimed Spack. "At long last, I'm back—this time as a hero!"

"Don't toast yourselves just yet," said General Loxoc, who was suddenly riding alongside their sled on a beautiful white stallion. He seemed less than pleased.

"But the date wheel on the watch just turned zero," protested Hill.

"Yes," replied the general curtly. "You have cut it very, very close. Far too close for our comfort. Do you realize just how dire our situation is?"

"Is it too late?" asked Spack nervously.

"That remains to be seen," replied the general. "Today the tree has begun to die and, within three days' time, its death will be complete. It's not clear whether we will be able to get the Dormian bloom planted in time. I'm sorry to say that our fate is in a most precarious situation. So the answer is that you may indeed be too late. Time will shortly tell."

The group continued onward in silence.

Eventually, the tunnel ended at a broad stone ledge. They saw before them a vast valley, in the middle of which stood the city of Somnos. It was all illuminated in moonlight. Spack gasped. "I-it's a-all wrong," she cried out. "What happened?"

The scene before them was terrifying. Instead of a green valley with lush vegetation and chirping birds, as Spack had previously described, snow and ice almost completely covered the ground. It was as if the glaciers from the mountains were creeping toward the city from all sides to strangle it in an icy choke-hold. They could clearly see that Somnos had been a land filled
with bounty. Palm trees dotted the landscape, but they were topped with tufts of snow. Mangoes still hung from their trees, but they were covered in frost. Icicles hung from thick jungle vines. Patches of tropical giant bamboo lay half-buried in massive snowbanks. Waterfalls, which once must have sprayed warm mist, were now frozen solid.

"It started a few months ago," explained General Loxoc. "We're down to our last reserves. Only the city is free of snow, but the temperature has been dropping the last few days. As I said, the tree is almost entirely dead. We are a city on the brink of extinction."

They stared blankly at the view. For the last few days, the thought of a warm, sunshine-filled day had spurred them on, and to be faced with more cold seemed cruel beyond words. Alfonso thought of Lars, alone at the top of his iceberg, dreaming of a warm Somnos. That dream was almost extinguished. The sapling needed to be planted—quickly.

Alfonso turned his attention to Somnos. It was surrounded by six enormous stone towers. These towers, which formed the perimeter of the city, were all evenly spaced about a mile apart. The towers were connected by a series of high city walls and, together, these walls formed a perfectly symmetrical hexagon. In the middle of the city stood an enormous tree. It was the Founding Tree of Somnos, and it was dying. More skeleton than tree, perhaps a fifth of its leaves still remained.

"Halt!" yelled General Loxoc. "We stop here for a few minutes."

The general rode his horse around the entire party and then returned to the sled, where he stopped and fixed his eyes on Alfonso.

"Your strong friend—Bilblox—how did he become blind?" the general asked pointedly.

"He was born that way," said Alfonso with as much confidence as he could muster.

General Loxoc said nothing. Eventually, he spoke again. "We will be in Somnos within an hour. We expected the Great Sleeper weeks ago but because of your late arrival, we will be forced to speed up our investigations of you and your party. Perhaps that was your plan all along?"

"What are you talking about?" protested Alfonso. "We came as fast as we could!"

"Oh, really?" asked the general. He stared harshly at a dead songbird nestled in a corner of the ledge. Obviously it had tried to protect itself from the cold, but to no avail. It was frozen in a sheath of ice.

T
HEY HURTLED
down a steep road to the valley below. The sled dashed across the frozen floor of the valley. Moonlight glistened off the ice. An hour or so passed. Eventually they heard the clanking of a gate as it opened. They were entering the city. The sled came to a halt and then it heaved up and down in a strange manner. Only when they started moving again did they understand why—t he sled runners had been replaced with wheels, since the snow did not appear to have entered the city.

With the wheels securely attached, they rode into Somnos and headed directly for one of the six towers. They approached a stone road that curled its way up around the tower the way a
snake might wind its way up a tree. When the carriage rolled onto the road, the vehicle began to shake terribly, as if the wheels were coming off. The road immediately slanted up so steeply that those facing backwards—Bilblox and Spack—tumbled off their seats and crashed into Alfonso and Hill. They could all hear the horses panting and straining to keep their forward momentum. The driver yelled harshly and cracked his whip.

Alfonso could not imagine how the horses could keep climbing up this road, but the animals plodded on, dragging themselves and the carriage around every turn. Everybody felt dizzy as the carriage circled up and up. After ten minutes, the horses came to an abrupt stop. The general appeared at the side of the carriage.

"Welcome to the foreigners' guesthouse," said the general. "It is situated at the very top of the city's northernmost tower. In the morning you'll see that you have quite a view. This is where you will be staying. It is specially equipped for those not accustomed to Dormian life. It has bedrooms with actual beds in it so that foreigners can lounge about and do nothing in their sleep."

"Do you get many visitors?" asked Hill.

"Not recently," replied the general. The tone in his voice discouraged them from asking any more questions.

The guesthouse was a beautiful, spacious home with more rooms than Alfonso, Hill, Spack, and Bilblox could possibly use. There was a dining room with a massive table holding a jug of greenish-colored liquid and a solitary bowl containing dried fruits and nuts; apparently, this was all the food that the
Dormians could spare in these dark times. The guesthouse also had a bedroom for each of them—each furnished with a massive king-size bed draped with thick blankets. In the middle of the house was a courtyard with a large earthen pot.

"Put the bloom there," ordered the general. "It will be well-protected."

Alfonso withdrew the bloom from its sealskin pack and placed it inside the pot. Though General Loxoc had seen it briefly when the soldiers had found Alfonso, he now stood riveted. He approached the bloom cautiously, saying nothing and stopping about two feet away. Then he snapped out of his spell and turned to leave without saying goodbye. He ordered the soldiers nearby to stand guard outside. "No one leaves," he commanded, with a last glance at Alfonso.

After the Dormian soldiers withdrew, Alfonso, Hill, Spack, and Bilblox sat down at a wooden table and devoured all the nuts and berries. In their starving conditions, it felt like a feast.

"I must say," said Hill with a mouthful of nuts. He looked around and slowly raised his glass, filled with the liquid that shimmered green. "I-I just want to say how proud I am to have traveled this road with all of you. We made it."

The others stopped chewing and swallowed quickly. They raised their glasses.

"To the bloom, and to Resuza," said Hill. They solemnly clinked glasses.

Alfonso gulped hard. His eyes stung with tears as the awful truth of Resuza's death came back to him.

They ate in silence for a few minutes.

Spack cleared her throat and looked at Hill. "I assume you'll be wanting to find your family?" she asked. "You said you came from Somnos, right?"

Hill nodded and looked at Alfonso. "I don't know what we'll find," he confessed. "It's been an awful long time since I left. I'm afraid I—"

"Don't worry, Uncle Hill," interrupted Alfonso. "We'll ask around first thing tomorrow."

***

After eating, they all retired to their bedrooms. Alfonso undressed quietly and readied himself for bed. As he took off his winter parka, Alfonso reached into the front pocket and removed the dark blue sphere that he had found in Straszydlo Forest. It had been such a difficult journey after Straszydlo Forest that he had almost forgotten about it. Besides, he never had a moment alone to play with it.

Alfonso couldn't help but smile rather mischievously as he tossed the sphere lightly into the air and watched it zoom up, almost hitting the ceiling. Alfonso then walked to an open window and threw it again. The sphere sailed out the window about two hundred feet and then hurtled back to his outstretched hand. Without even thinking, Alfonso closed his eyes, concentrated intensely on the sphere, and threw it just as he entered hypnogogia. This time the sphere sailed out a mile and then turned back toward his hand and shot backwards with such tremendous speed that it was back in his grip within a second or two. Over the next five minutes, Alfonso played with the sphere while in hypnogogia. He discovered that, in this state, he was able to exert a much greater degree of control over the sphere itself. He learned, for example, that very subtle movements in his fingertips could affect how far, fast, and forcefully the sphere traveled. What's more, very slight adjustments in how he held his wrist greatly altered the direction in which the sphere would travel.

Alfonso spun the sphere in his palm, like a top. It glowed briefly, spun quite fast, and then abruptly stopped. A light flickered from within the sphere, and suddenly images of a man appeared in the glass. He was a bald monk with only one eye set high into his forehead. Astonished, Alfonso hunched over to get a better look. The monk was working in what appeared to be an orchard. He carefully pruned branches and picked oversize yellow fruit. After about five minutes of this, the images grew faint and then disappeared.

Dazed and tired, Alfonso shoved the sphere back into his parka and wearily climbed into bed. He leaned over to a nearby side table to turn off a lantern, but noticed just underneath an elegant book that gleamed in the light. Alfonso's eyes grew wide as he read the title. Quickly, he got out of his bed, picked up the book, and sat down in an old rocking chair in a corner of the room. He cracked open the cover and began reading:

T
HE
G
REAT
S
LEEPERS OF
D
ORMIA
: A C
OMPLETE
H
ISTORY

by Doctor Katarzyna Lipska

Chapter I

The First Great Sleeper

Thousands of years ago, when humans were few and scattered across the earth, a small group of Siberian nomads were separated by a winter storm from their prized possession, a herd of reindeer. They searched for these animals everywhere, and wandered deep into the mountains.

After many terrible frost-bit months, the starving nomads stumbled upon a small valley free of snow and filled with all manner of tropical life. In the middle of the valley stood the Founding Tree. The nomads settled there and became the people of Dormia.

It was a beautiful but strange tree. The swaying of the enormous leaves made them tired, but when they slept, they did so fitfully. At first, they thought it was their location: they were in the far north. In the wintertime, darkness fell over them like a thick blanket, and in the summer, the sun shone all day and all night. But soon they realized that it was the tree that caused such strangeness when they slept. It was something in the way that the leaves swayed and the branches swished in the wind.

Over the years, the elders and scholars of Dormia investigated the tree. They analyzed its power to transform barren land into fertile soil. They also noticed the effect of the tree on
their people and they discovered that it unlocked within each of them the capacity of wakeful or active sleeping. The great Dormian scholar Nazanin Moghbeli has described this as "a state of deep concentration, somewhat like meditation, that allows one to perform feats of amazing precision.
"

In time, the Dormian knowledge of sleep grew deeper and more intricate. They learned when to accomplish tasks while asleep, and when to remain awake. They became expert defenders, and trained the first of the Dormian knights, who were particularly skilled in sleep warfare.

Along with the study of sleep, Dormian elders undertook rigorous study of their lifeblood—the Founding Tree. They began by attempting to grow new Founding Trees, but they failed. This disturbed them greatly. How would they survive if the Founding Tree died?

Their questions were answered when the first Founding Tree began to fail. A stranger—an old woman bent over like a blade of grass—arrived at the Dormian city. She presented the anxious Dormians with an unbelievable gift, a sapling of the Founding Tree. She lived in the flood plain of the Yangtze River, and told a fantastic story of sleep-walking for many nights to a nearby gorge, where her sleeping-self carefully tended a few seeds. They were the seeds of the Founding Tree, and she was the first Great Sleeper.