Soldier at the Door (73 page)

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In his office Perrin, too, suddenly felt the need to look up at the peaks that loomed so high his windows couldn’t fully contain them. He stood up from his desk and walked over to the window for a better look. He always watched the forest, but rarely the mountains behind them. But today he did, and his chest unexpectedly burned.

He saw colors he never noticed before, shades of gray, brown, green, white—all of them distinct and separate and more detailed than he ever imagined.

Until that day he never really noticed that the mountains weren’t all just one color. They were as varied and mottled as . . .

As . . .

A good comparison didn’t come to mind. There really wasn’t anything to compare them to. The mountains were their own thing.

And they would be ignored no longer.

-
--

At Edge’s Inn, Hycymum paused to look out of the kitchen door that abutted the alley, and noticed for the first time the white snow-capped peaks. Snow must come early up there at the top. She never realized before how the snow resembled whipped cream. It almost looked tasty. She turned to go back into the Inn, but found herself stopping to stare again at the mountains.

Why had she never before seen the cream?

-
--

Down in Idumea, High General Shin, accompanying his wife to the carriage, glanced to see why she stopped. Joriana looked towards the faint, hazy blue in the distance where her son and his family lived, and she sighed.

Relf looked north and thought about his grandchildren. Then . . .

“I never noticed that before,” he murmured.

“Noticed what?” his wife asked.

He shook his head in amazement. “You can see the mountains from here! That distant pale purple—”

“The jagged line on the horizon—yes, I see it! Those
are
the mountains!” Joriana exclaimed in wonder.

Together they stared in silence at the north. It was so obvious now.

“So why did we never see them before?” Relf whispered, almost reverently, almost nervously.

---

In the large orange and red stone Administration building, Chairman Mal, back on the job, shouted at two disappointing Administrators until he turned red in the face.

In the hallway Dr. Brisack stood ready with a bottle of heart tonic, because he heard
Nicko’s frantic squeals of, “How can the last son of the king just vanish?! Look harder! I need Dormin!”

Dr. Brisack was also feeling some disappointment. The letter skimmers hadn’t seen anything come in from Mrs. Shin, and each one of them was watching for her distinctive handwriting
in order to whisk her letter immediately to the Administrator’s desk. Brisack was beginning to suspect nothing would be coming, and that filled him with growing disillusionment. He thought there was a little bit
more
to her. 

Down the hall, still cloistered in his office, Gadiman pored over pages, writing and writing and hoping no one would knock on his door.

No one ever did.

---

Back up in Edge, Shem Zenos, taking his midday meal break at the fort, looked down into his mug and turned it slowly. He glanced up at the sand clock above the door and smiled at the time. He nodded at nothing, stood up, and walked outside.

He glanced at the mountains, saw immediately what he was
looking for, then he headed back to his bunk for a nap.

---

And down from the fort, Mahrree continued to stare at the mountains.

“What do you see?” came the panicked voice from over the fence.

Mahrree, startled, looked to her left to see a pair of anxious eyes peering over the wooden fence, mousy brown hair above them shaking slightly.

“Nothing, Mrs. Hersh. I was just noticing the mountains.”

“Why?” the woman in her late thirties exclaimed, standing a little taller now that there was no immediate danger about to come over the fence.

Mahrree blinked at that. “Why not? Look at them—I mean,
really
look at them. Fascinating! The crevices, the colors, the foliage—I never before noticed. So mysterious! So intrigue—”

That’s when she saw the look
of astonishment on Mrs. Hersh’s peaked face. Mahrree glanced down to make sure she hadn’t suddenly transformed into a rabid wolf. Her neighbor seemed to think she had.

“
Why are saying such things?
” she hissed.

“Why not?”

“The mountains are . . . are . . .
deformed!
They’re not
natural!
” Mrs. Hersh gestured madly at the objects she dared not look at. “Land should be flat! I’m just glad my house faces away from that,” she spat with a grimace. “I keep telling my husband we need to leave, but he says, ‘Just ignore them.’ How long can we ignore them?! They’re hideous! Everyone knows that!”

Mahrree took an earnest step forward. “Who first told us they were deformed and hideous? I’ve never been able to find out! Don’t you ever wonder—I mean
really wonder
—that if everything we claim is true really isn’t simply someone else’s opinion? And we’ve repeated it so often that we all accept it’s true? But what if it’s
not
?”

Mrs.
Hersh’s eyes bulged, and she looked uncomfortably at Mahrree’s hand. Mahrree hadn’t realized that she had been gesturing with Perrin’s underpants. She tossed them behind her into the basket.

That made Mrs. Hersh only slightly more at ease.

“Who cares?” she said as threw her hands in the air. “Mountains are dangerous! Stay away! That’s even what your husband says, so why fight it?”

Mahrree took a few more steps to the fence.

Mrs. Hersh took a defensive step away.

“Why fight it? Because what if everything we believe is
wrong
?”

Mahrree saw her poor neighbor’s eyes glaze over. She knew better than to get into a debate with Mrs. Shin. That was something else everybody ‘knew.’ If Mahrree didn’t break people down by lo
gic, she did so out of sheer persistence. Mrs. Hersh realized too late she’d been dragged into the discussion, and the dread in her eyes demonstrated a frantic desire to escape.

But there was also something else there: a sudden loyalty to her society that demanded no one step out of bounds.

“Then we’re wrong
together
,” Mrs. Hersh decided. “Being united is important,” she said as if realizing she actually believed that. “What everyone thinks
together
is
correct
,” she reasoned out loud, “and so if you follow the crowd, you’ll never be wrong.”

Mahrree’s shoulders fell. How can you open someone’s eyes who holds them firmly shut, yet claims she sees just fine?

“It’s like the river,” Mrs. Hersh went on, emboldened by Mahrree’s discouraged silence. “Everything flows downstream. Simply . . . go with that flow. It’s just easier that way.”

Mahrree saw her way back in. “Fish don’t flow downstream.”

“Yes they do.”

“No, they don’t.”

Mrs. Hersh put her hands on her hips. “Why wouldn’t they?”

“Because then there’d be no more fish up here in Edge!” Mahrree pointed out. “I’ve seen them when I’ve taken my students to see the river, and when I’ve dragged my fishing husband home again.  Many fish swim in the same spot, fighting the current. A few species even swim upstream, against everything pushing them to the southern ocean.”

Mrs. Hersh pondered for a moment. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why wouldn’t they just go with the flow of the river?”

“Because,” Mahrree tried not to sigh at her neighbor’s inanity, “maybe they don’t like where the
river is going
! Salty water at the end of it likely kills them.”

Mrs. Hersh squinted. “How would they know about the salty water? Besides, so what? At least they had an easy time getting to it. They’re going die eventually, so might as well go easily instead of fighting the current.”

And right then Mahrree realized, to her horror, that the Administrators had won. 

People didn’t need to think for themselves, they
only needed to think what
everyone else
thought. They didn’t need to worry about the color of the sky, because
everyone
agreed it was only blue. They didn’t need to worry if they were drifting to an irreversible tragedy, as long as they were doing it together,
united
.

Because as long as everyone else was doing it, you should too. Hold hands and jump off the crevice together, never questioning why.

“I’d rather fight the current,” Mahrree said quietly.

Mrs. Hersh shrugged her shoulders. “You’re a lovely neighbor, Mrs. Shin, always willing to lend an egg, but I truly don’t understand you.”

The debate was over.

Mrs. Hersh glanced at the mountains, shuddered so dramatically she should have been performing in the amphitheater, and marched back to her house.

There was only one thing left for Mahrree to do.

She turned to face the peaks fully. She could see things in any way she wanted to. And to her, the mountains seemed the way they had in her dreams of a large house with weathered gray wood and window boxes filled with herbs.

They were majestic. Powerful. Awe-inspiring.

Beautiful.

And then, for a brief moment, she thought that she could see
almost
everything in them and beyond. She’d always regarded them as a barrier of some sort, made of tall dead things like the stockade fence that surrounded the fort.

But the mountains were
alive
.

Even at this distance she could see trees sway as a wind blew
past. The yellow specks weren’t flowers, but leaves being blown off of high spindly trees, like tiny flakes. Surely there was even more alive up there. Where did the bears, mountain lions, and wolves that visited the forest, and sometimes the villages, come from?

What
else
might be there, alive?

She’d asked Perrin about the other side of the mountains over a year ago, but even then she’d never actually
looked
at them. Now she couldn’t seem to pull her eyes away from them. She wished she had her husband’s spy glass to peer up into the crevices of the rocky terrain. Surely there would be something peering back at her!

Mahrree’s chest tightened with possibilities. What if . . . what if there was even
more
than she ever dreamed about?

Her chest tightened even more, but now with dread.

Dreams could be very frightful things. Did she
really
want to know? Deeply, desperately? Or was it all just a silly romantic notion? True, she went into the forest, but she was so frightened of it she nearly wet her drawers like a two-year-old. Would she really have gone with that woman if circumstances were different?

Maybe it was because the woman had an air about her that told Mahrree she wouldn’t be leaving Edge that Mahrree felt courageous enough to proclaim she would. It’s so easy to be brave when ever
yone knows you can’t prove it.

And that woman’s words . . .

Despite Mahrree trying to forget what happened that night, her words still bounced in her head.

“All I do is save lives.”

So was it the women that preserved and hid other women, while the men killed? What if Mahrree had run into a man instead of a woman that night?

She also finally recalled the words of that gray old man: “May the Creator always bless and preserve this family.”

Mahrree cringed. How arrogant she had been, assuming that nothing would happen to her because of an old man’s wish. Of course she could have been killed! What had she been thinking that night?! She knew, always, that she was merely a loud coward.

But her husband? Perrin truly was a brave man. And so was his father.

She tried to stop looking at the mountains and boulders and forest where she learned the truth that she was nothing more than a steam vent, pouring out so much heat and stench, yet accomplishing nothing. But still the north continued to captivate her. For some odd reason right then, it was all just so appealing.

And it was all f
ar too confusing. There was simply too much she didn’t know, and that nagged at her. She hated knowing she didn’t know.

She was missing something, very important.

-
--

Dormin struggled to move, but instead he crumpled to his knees. He wasn’t the first one to do so at that spot. He continued to stare, his mouth slowly dropping open, and his eyes filling with tears.