The Glass Mountains (11 page)

Every night I combed through Artie. Everyone else thought I spoiled him and that my spoiling would turn him bad, but I knew that wasn’t possible. He hauled more than any other dog, and he deserved to be treated with respect. The hair of some of the dogs had grown matted and infested, which amazed me; back in our village owners had taken great pride in their pets. Children were taught to groom first their dogs and then themselves before going to bed. I thought of what Cray had said about remembering our kindness and thought he would be disappointed.
 

He would be disappointed, but he wouldn’t hold our behavior against us. It’s hard to express the fatigue we all felt. Every hour of every day we felt tired. We felt tired when we woke up and while we walked and while we took breaks. Even when I slept there was the feeling that the sleep wasn’t quite deep enough. In Bakshami the annual heavy rains could beat you down, while the dryness sucked the life out of you. We’d actually been hoping to encounter heavy rain, as we would have gotten at this time of year back in our village. Sometimes I even hoped for a life-threatening storm, because the monotony of each dry day seemed like a greater threat than a storm, no matter how big. I wanted to feel something again, to miss my parents and Maruk and Katinka. But I was too tired.
 

Though nothing horrible happened, this part of the trip was in certain ways worse than the previous part. The tedium of walking overwhelmed us at times. I felt I wanted to bury my head in the sand and suffocate myself to escape the tedium. When, half-starving, we reached the second lake, we collapsed in it with the dogs. One man was so tired his head fell under the water and he didn’t bother to lift it. Jobei helped him lift himself.
 

This lake was smaller by far than the last, and now there was no question of settling down. No one saw the point of staying. We found the discards of a previous group of campers—goods that probably had grown too heavy to carry. Mostly the previous group had left behind glass bottles, probably using furrto skins instead as water containers. Bakshami was a culture of glass: unbreakable glass, breakable glass, colored and clear glass, sand glass and rock glass and glass woven into threads. But during the last month when we’d been famished, we’d taken to chewing on our furrto skins. So the skins, in addition to being lighter than the bottles, doubled as food during a pinch. At the new lake we trapped furrtos for both food and new water containers.
 

We’d started cutting our hair short and shaving the dogs to get rid of the fleas, but at the lake we let our hair grow again. One family announced the mother was pregnant. They started to build a dwelling, and another family began a dwelling of their own. But except for Ansmeea and a few especially weak children, our bodies had grown into the walking. We moved with less grace but greater strength than we once had. As exhausted as we were, we still held hopes for the future, and we knew there was no future at this little lake. It wasn’t large enough to support a village even a small portion of the size of my old town. So, eventually, forty-nine of us left.
 

This time as we walked Jobei’s face thinned and grew gaunt. He retained his sweetness, but Leisha grew sullen and quiet. She didn’t care about mimicry or jokes anymore. Sometimes Jobei would try to perk her up by asking her to tell him jokes or by making up jokes to tell her. And Tarkahn’s previous constant talking had devolved into a nonsensical muttering that grew quieter and quieter until one day he moved his lips but no sound came out. I don’t know which day that happened—it happened so slowly the change had seemed almost natural, and I could scarcely imagine a time when he’d expressed himself with vigor.
 

We gave Ansmeea an extra ration each day, but she continued to wither away until we didn’t understand how she stayed alive. Her brown hair had gotten bleached from the sun even through her hood, and her skin, which formerly held tinges of sky blue, turned pink like her mother’s had been, so that she looked less and less like a Bakshami. She no longer walked; Artie carried her on the sled every day.
 

Now and then we’d come across skeletons, but most of them appeared old, from before the current troubles. There were a few, however, that appeared more recent. If there was no food we chewed on these bones for sustenance.
 

Not long after the previous lake, we came across a camp that had been decimated much as ours had been. The ashes hadn’t yet been incorporated into the landscape, and a sickening sweet smell lingered. The thought that we could be killed even this far into our trip disillusioned all of us, and one man, who’d already lost his will, lost his life as well at that. He simply looked at that decimated camp and he lay down, the life gone from him.
 

We didn’t even bother to play the rhythms. I lay awake until half-night staring into the sky and listening for the sound of humming. Once I looked around and saw the faces of my compatriots under the bright moons. All of them had eyes wide open as they stared into the sky and listened for the humming. I don’t know when the others fell asleep, but when I next woke the midday sun hung hot above camp. Usually, we woke before sunrise. Several other people still slept, and more appeared to have just arisen. After that we lost the meaning of what we did. That is, we no longer thought of the goal of reaching the hotlands, we just knew that every day we walked. Walking was what we did and walkers who we were. Except for Jobei, who retained his sweetness, we grew to have no other personality except our personality as walkers. When I opened my eyes I saw the sand on which I walked, and when I closed my eyes I saw myself walking on the sand. It grew too tiresome to hold my head up as I walked, so generally I watched the feet of the person in front of me.
 

Time passed in this way. A baby was born, but he died. Otherwise nothing much changed. At every lake, one or two or more stayed behind so that finally only thirty of us remained. Surprisingly, Ansmeea survived. We felt no sense of triumph at our achievement. We were nothing more than insects.
 

One of the lakes at which we’d expected to replenish our supplies turned out to be nothing more than a puddle, and we kept ourselves alive by drinking our own urine. We were trudging along in our zombielike way one day when Tarkahn suddenly exclaimed out loud, “Look, look!” It was the first time we’d heard his voice in months, so rather than look at what he pointed to with his finger we first looked at him, at his sunken face and twig of a finger. Then, across the flat expanse of sand, we saw a glimmering sliver like our silver moon Damos rising over the horizon in the evenings. It wasn’t Damos; it was the crest of Mount Artekka, the highest peak of the fabled Glass Mountains. I thought then that I’d never seen anything so intoxicating and beautiful as that sliver of shining hope, as that picture of our future rising over the horizon. And for the first time in months I felt emotion. I felt I loved Jobei and Leisha and all my fellow travelers; I wondered what had happened to my parents and Maruk and hoped I might hear news of them soon; and I remembered my home, and what a sanctuary it had been not only against the sun and heat but against all types of worry and cruelty as well.
 

We fell to the sand and kissed it, thanking it for letting us get this far. We walked with new ardor for the next few days, our mood elevating as the mountains before us rose higher. The mountains reflected sunlight, and at times the heat neared the unbearable, even for people used to great heat. But we couldn’t be stopped now. Our supplies had run low and we’d cut rations by a third, yet our energy grew rather than diminished. During the day Tarkahn’s voice rose to a snappy mumble, and he began to talk in his sleep again.
 

His talking heartened me on the one hand, because it showed his spirits were rising. On the other hand, his talking saddened me, because he talked about the recent past, and the recent past was gone. The recent past had not yet turned to dust and blown to the hotlands to become a part of the Glass Mountains. The world in which I had been raised was in limbo.

2

The Glass Mountains had always been and would always be. They contained everything and everybody that had ever existed in Bakshami, except whatever had been destroyed in the recent past. Here I myself would come to rest, after my bones had turned to dust.
 

As we walked I could see nothing but glass around us, reflecting the heat until my blood seemed to boil inside me. The mountains weren’t smooth, except in places. They were ragged, occasionally like prisms, and they weren’t really glass but a type of quartz. Clouds of dust occasionally covered the sky above them.
 

At night, however, the dust settled and the temperatures dropped. The stars shone all around. While in daytime I was surrounded by a thousand blazing reflections of the sun, at night a million reflections of the stars glimmered around me, and I knew the meaning of paradise.
 

On the fifth night after Tarkahn had spotted Mount Artekka, we reached the Glass Mountains. The night was clear and the moons reflected endlessly off the surfaces of the mountains. We continued to walk at night, to try to get through while it was a little cooler. I felt amazed that any outsiders had successfully made this trip, but then I remembered that many had died on the way to the hotlands, and many others had traveled with entourages—servants and numerous dogs per person. Most had traveled from another direction.
 

When we couldn’t go any farther we slept for a few hours and rose before sunrise to continue. It took several days to get through the mountains, and the only reason we made it was because without our knowing it our will had grown stronger during our long trek. Tarkahn was the first through, and from my place in the middle of the pack I could hear him talking, “There’s the village we’ve all heard so much about, it doesn’t look like much to me, I don’t know what the fuss is about, our village was bigger than that, but on the other hand I don’t know that I was ever as glad to see our village as I am to see this one; that is, I felt a deeper love for our village, but I can’t really say I felt excited every time I saw it; but in any case I do feel disappointed...”
 

I, too, felt disappointed looking down the sweeping valley and seeing a village so far away it looked like a dollhouse, and an empty one, too, since no people walked the paths through town. I’d thought we were closer and that the village was larger. But when I first saw a person leaving a building my heart beat in my ears and I felt dizzy. I could see then that it was not a dollhouse spread before me but a real village, one where I might soon live, and one where I might soon hear news of my family. Mountains ringed the village, and two miraculous lakes shimmered. So far as I knew, this area was the most unlevel in Bakshami. I’d never seen lakes in a valley before. The effect inspired me and filled me with love for this village. Of course it wasn’t paradise by any means. Dust and sand swirled over the houses just as it did over all Bakshami, and the dwellings were modest even by the standards of my people.
 

We kept walking, and as night began to fall we saw people come out to light lanterns in front of their houses, and more and more people began to walk outside, going from one building to another. We watched as crowds began to fill the paths. Someone said that those were not houses at all below, but saloons.
 

“What’s a saloon?” said Jobei.
 

“It’s a place where you’ll never go,” said an uncle sternly. But it turned out the uncle was mistaken, for a few days later, hungry, out of water, we walked thirty strong, with forty dogs, into the first door we came to. Though the sun blazed, when we passed through the door the inside was as dark as my house used to be at night when lit by candles. The saloon’s builders had added just a few windows, and heavy drapes of a type of fabric I’d never seen hung across what windows there were. Surprised by the drop in temperature and nervous to have arrived, I felt a slight but unusual chill. Only a few people sat at tables scattered about the large room. Hardly any of them looked Bakshami to me.
 

“Can I help you?” said a man’s soft voice from the bar.
 

“More villagers running from the Formans,” said a voice with disgust. “How many more are there to be? A man like me can take only so much.” The speaker was neither male nor female as far as I could see, and perhaps wasn’t even human. “What are you staring at?” he snapped at me.
 

I stepped back and tripped over Artie, causing laughter throughout the room.
 

“Hayseeds!” the speaker exclaimed.
 

I’d never before heard the word he used but felt sure of its intent.
 

“That one shivers as if she’s cold!”
 

The man with the soft voice stepped into the path of some light coming through the drapes. He was a slight Bakshami man with his head shaved bald. “Lokahn processes the refugees. He’s at the biggest saloon, across town.”
 

“How many more of us are there?” said my uncle.
 

“Thousands, we don’t know what to do with them all.”
 

“Where are they all then?”
 

“Asleep. Why get out of bed at this hour?”
 

“But it’s almost midday.”
 

“Exactly my point.”