The True Game Read online

  I mimicked his mime, used his word. "Thruf," made walking motions. The soft gabbling continued among them, and several got up to come after me, following, walky-walky in the soft grass, going nowhere. They giggled. Evidently several would go with me, when I went. Time enough to go when the sun came up, or so I thought. They thought otherwise. The ones who had appointed themselves, or had been appointed, for all I knew, took up my belongings and went to get my horse, standing nose to nose with the beast as each made whiffling noises of intimate interrogation and reply. Nothing would do but that I mount the animal and go along quietly as they led him. Well enough. If I put my mind to it, I could almost sleep in the saddle. So we went, along the pebbled shoreline of the waters-though well back from the edge-toward the north. The sky grew dim, milky with dawn, and my guides showed consternation amounting almost to agitation. There was an abrupt halt

  to forward movement, a casting about from place to place, then a long "hoor-oor-oor" from a forested slope. The others followed it and brought me to a cave let, dark as a nostril in the side of the mountain. They laid my belongings down, made quick forays into the wood for dry branches and twigs, piled these beside the wall of the hill, then vanished within the darkness to a trailing "hoor-oor-oor-oor." I decided this meant hello, goodbye, and here-I-am. I called softly after them. The answer was silence.

  So. I was abandoned for the daylight hours. Their huge eyes and winglike ears should have told me they were creatures of the dark. I had the day before me and was not sleepy, so I went fishing. It took half the day to make a proper fish spear and half the afternoon to spear fish enough for the troop. I had a nap and built the fire up before they appeared at dusk. I was not long in doubt whether they liked fish, for there was much smacking of narrow lips, rubbing of round bellies, and hooting of a melodious kind. When they had eaten every scrap of skin and sniffed the bones several times, they urged me into the saddle once more to ride throughout the night. Again, they led while I slept, waking only a little now and again to see a changed horizon, a mountain moved from before me to behind me. I told off the days of my journey, counted them, named them over. Tomorrow, I told myself, would be rabbit day. I had little food left in the saddle bags and we had left the stream behind us.

  So it went, rabbit day succeeded by dove day, succeeded by fish day II, succeeded by the day we ate greens and nuts. The little people were mightily disappointed at this, but I had had no luck at all in the hunt. We had come to a stretch of moorland crossed by tiny rivulets. There was greenery aplenty, but nothing seemed to be feeding on it but us. That night, half way through the dark hours' travel, I saw the glow of fire upon the horizon, half hidden behind a bulk of hill. Before morning it stood plain before us, fountains of fire, and behind them more fountains yet to the limits of vision. "Thruf," gabbled my escort in great satisfaction. "Thrufarufarufaruf" I presumed that this meant more fires than one.

  As there were. Soon we walked among them, the glowing hills around us closer and more difficult to avoid. Flames erupted from hidden vents in the stone, liquid fire ran into crevasses to glow and breathe like embers, nearer and nearer. Soon we came to a place where there was no avoidance possible. Directly before the horse's nose a wide strip of glowing lava lay, shining scarlet in the light wind, crusted and scabbed with cinder. The horse shuddered and refused to go further. "Chirrup," said one of the shadow people importantly, pulling at my leg. "Chirrup." They pulled my things from the home's back, handing me some of them to carry, carrying others themselves. Then, without hesitation, the chirruping four-handed one set his furry feet onto the glowing stone. Others followed, one remaining behind to hold the horse. "Walk on fire," I told myself, sweating, waiting for the pain to burn upward through the soles of my boots. Nothing. Around me the crackle of flames, but my feet were cool. "Chirrup," my guide called. "Thrufarufarufarufamf"

  We walked as on a road of glass. The appearance of fire was only reflection from the geysers and fountains to either side. Rivers of fire ran beside us. Heaped mountains of half molten stuff built into fantastic shapes. From these came heat as from a furnace, but upon the road we walked it was cool. We seemed to be crossing a narrow neck of the fiery land between two towering heights crowned with spouting smoke which boiled upward toward the bloody cloud, hideous and heavy with ash and rain. Before me the little ones began to run, gamboling from side to side of the way. "Chirrup, chirrup, Peter, eater, ter, ter."

  An answering call came from ahead. We ventured between the last flaming fountains to emerge upon a hillside, green and cool, with a steady wind blowing the heat away and a glint of water showing among the trees. The little ones leapt on, me laboring after them, wishing I had taken time to pack properly and roll my blankets so they would not fall around my feet. As it was, I arrived in a shambling rush, half tripped up by trailing bedstuffs, red-faced from the heat and the hurry, to fall on my face before the one who awaited us. She did me the discourtesy of laughing rudely.

  "Rise, Sir Gamesman," she said, sneering at the tumbled stuff around me. She turned away to hold a multisyllabled conversation with the quadrumanna which seemed to much delight them, for they giggled endlessly and rolled upon the ground clutching at themselves.

  "I have asked them," she said, "if you are one of the mythical tumble-bats who roll themselves endlessly through the world not knowing their heads from their tails. They are inclined to believe this, though they say you are a good provider and are, possibly the one whose travel was arranged for by Mavin Manyshaped. Are you indeed he?"

  "She is my mother," I said wearily.

  "Ah. Well then, you are he. Mavin has not so many sons that we would mistake one of them for another. Your name would be Peter?"

  "Yes. And yours?"

  "You may call me Thynbel, or Sambeline. Or anything else you would rather."

  I grasped at the last name. Sambeline. Did my mother arrange for you to meet me?"

  "Indeed, no. She arranged for me to meet the people of Proom to pay them for their trouble in guiding you here. Though they say they are already well paid since they have your horse."

  "My horse? What will they do with my horse?"

  "It may be they will sell him, but I think they will eat him." I could think of no reply to this. It was not a horse I had loved or cared for, but still, it was a good horse. A well-trained horse. A horse which had served me well. "If you pay them, would they consent not to eat the horse?"

  "It may be. Or I may pay them and they may eat the horse regardless. But I will try for you."

  So she did, engaging in a lengthy and intricate argument, full of words which echoed themselves endlessly. At last the little people giggled a final round, held out their hands for their pay, and had put into those hands a wealth of silvery bells and metal flutes, bright as the sun. They clasped my legs, slapped my sides, called me "Peter, eater, ter, ter" one last time and went capering back down the trail of false fire into the distant dawn.

  Sambeline waved at them, turned to me, saying, "They say they will turn the horse loose in the meadows until you return. Peter. They may do that. They may forget. They may do it and then forget and eat it later. They forget a lot, those little ones. They forget where they put their bells and flutes. They lose them by the dozens. So they are always eager for more and are willing to be paid. If they did not lose things, they would not work for us at all. Now they will have music for a time and sing many long songs of their trip to the firelands with the son of Mavin Manyshaped."

  I finished packing my things into more compact bundles and strapped them together into a pack I could carry. She made no offer to help, merely sneered at these efforts. I said, "I must needs go further, but you say you are not my guide?"

  "No. I will go with you a short way. You are in the land of Schlaizy Noithn, the land of the Shifters. None can guide you here. This is Schlaizy Noithn and no roads run the same here. Not for long. Where do you want to go?''

  I sat upon the pack. The dawn had uncovered a green land, forested, flowing
with rivers and spotted with pools and lakes. It lay beneath the height on which we stood, stretching north and west in a lovely bowl which cupped at the edge of vision to other heights. "I seek the monument of Thandbar," I said. "Can you tell me where to find it?"

  "You think unshifterish," she commented, "when you ask where in Schlaizy Noithn you would find the monument of Thandbar."

  I thought on this. It made a certain kind of sense. Thandbar had been the first and greatest of Shifters. Surely his memorial would not be a stable, unchanging thing. It would change, move, shift. "If you had to find it," tasked her, "where would you look?"

  "Up and down, here and there, among, between, around, in and out of," she said.

  "Upon," I offered. "Within, beneath, through and over."

  "Exactly." she replied. "That is more shifterish. There may be hope for Mavin's outland son."

  5

  Schlaizy Noithn

  During the time that followed I learned of shifterish behavior, and thoughts, and habits. How could this be summed up so that you will understand, you of the world in which mountains do not walk and roadways do not run; you of the world in which you wake in the same place you have slept, find your way by landmarks, travel by maps and charts? Having made one journey in the little lake ship, I had seen, though learned nothing of the art of, guidance by the stars. In Schlaizy Noithn, that is what I did, for nothing but the stars remained unchanging through the nights and days of travel. I despair of explaining "shifterish" to you except to say that it is difficult for one reared in a Schooltown. And yet, from what I learned later, that rearing had been a mercy my Mother had given me which many young Shifters would have been glad to receive. Well, there is no better way to tell it than to tell it, as Chance would have said. So I will tell.

  I entered the country of Schlaizy Noithn with Sambeline walking beside me. I said something or other, and she replied, making a remark about Mavin being much respected there, and after a short silence I turned to say something to her but found a huge, shambling pombi walking beside me, its monstrous head swinging to and fro with each step, long tongue lolloped between fangs of curved ivory. I was too frightened to do anything. My first thought was that this beast had killed Sambeline and left her bleeding body somewhere behind us, but when the beast looked up at me abstractedly before leaving the path to climb a hollow tree, to which it clung with one great, clawed foot while dipping into the hollow with the other to suck the honey-dripping paw with every evidence of pleasure, I began to guess that pombi and Sambeline were one. When the pombi blurred, shifted, and flew away through the trees on wide wings of softest white, calling a two pitched oo-ooo as it went, when the honey tree shock itself and moved away through the forest on roots suddenly as flexible as fingers, leaving me alone, then I began to know what shifterish meant. I began to understand why it was that Sambeline had sneered at my belongings. Does a pombi need a blanket? A cookpot? A firestarter? I put down the pack and stared at it, unwilling to leave it and yet sure it marked me as nothing else could-stranger, outsider, outlander. Was this dangerous or otherwise? I could not tell.

  Among the Gamesmen of Barish there were sixteen tiny figures representing Shifters. In an ordinary set of Gamesmen, such as are given to children for their little two-space games, these would be the pawns. In my set, Shifters; and one of them, or perhaps all of them held the persona of Thandbar, old sent-far himself, shiftiest of all. Presumably none of this would have been strange to him, and yet I never thought of taking a Shifter figure into my hand, never considered it. Later I wondered why I had not done. It was simple enough: pride. Shifting was my own talent, the one to which I had been born. I wanted no instruction in it from another. I wanted it to be mine. So, out of ignorance and pride, all unprepared for what I would meet or see or be required to do, I went on into the country of Schlaizy Noithn quite alone.

  So.

  I sat upon a hill beside a grotesque pile of stones, twisted and warped as though shaped thus when molten, making an uneasy meal of fish. These were unusual fish in that they had not howled and climbed up the fish spear to engulf my hands with a maw of ravening fury before melting into a swarm of butterflies and scattering into impalpability against the sky. Because these fish were quiet, these fish, reason said, were real fish, edible fish. Reason said that. Stomach was uncertain.

  Beside me the warped stones grated into speech, moving slowly as lips might if they were as wide and tall as a man.

  "Whoooo suuuups in Schlaaaaaizeee Noiiiiithnnnn?"

  I said, "Peter, the son of Mavin Manyshaped," while trying to keep my heart from leaping out of my breast. The stone said nothing more. However, a long spit of earth began to grow from beside me, upward and outward like a curving branch of the living hill, out to turn again and look at me, opening from its tip a curious eye of milky blue, lashed with grasses, which blinked, blinked, blinked at me, staring. It stared while the fish cooked, while I ate them, while I scrubbed my knife and put it away, while I put out the fire, then turned to stare after me still as I walked away. When I looked back at the crest of the next hill, the eye had grown a bit taller to keep me in view.

  Sometimes the road moved. Sometimes it moved in the direction I was going, sometimes sideways, sometimes backwards. Sometimes it jumped, like a cranky horse hopping when it is first saddled. When the road went against my direction, I got off as soon as possible, always apologizing for doing so-or for having been on it in the first place. It was hard to walk unless there was a road, for the land was full of impassable tangles. Sometimes the roads spoke to me, sometimes they cursed me. Once a road held fast to my feet while it carried me back a full day's journey. Will you understand my stupidity when I tell you that I walked the day's journey again on my own two feet, carrying my pack?

  They-whoever they were-grew impatient.

  I stopped when it grew dark, took my firelighter out of the pack and laid kindling beneath it, ready for the spark. The kindling reached up and flipped it out of my hands to be caught by a bird sitting on a stone. The bird flew away, carrying the firelighter in her claws, and I seemed to hear small, cawing laughter from the air. I cursed, cursed the place, the inhabitants, myself. Nothing seemed to hear me or care, save that the tops of the trees moved in a wind I had not felt till then and clouds began to boil in the sunset, so many puffy gray dumplings in a red soup of sky. Within moments it began to rain. My kindling grew legs and walked into the brush. I rolled myself into my blankets and nibbled on a handful of nuts collected during the day's travel. A stag came out of the forest, trumpeted challenge to another which appeared from behind me; the two charged one another over my body. I rolled, frantic, scraped across stones which left me bleeding, sat up to see the two stags running into the trees my blankets caught upon their antlers.

  I sat beneath a tree, water dripping down my neck, without blankets, without fire, the rain continuing in an endless, mocking stream. Whenever I moved, it found me. There was no shelter near except a hollow high in the tree into which wings flickered from time to time, outlined against flashes of lightning. I was cold. My clothes were little use except to hold some warmth against my body. I felt a little tug at one ankle. The next lightning flash showed a small, razor edged vine cutting the seams of my trousers while a tendril sifted a kind of powder on my boots. Two lightning flashes later and the boots were sprouting fungus from every surface, huge, soggy sponges covering my feet. Wings flickered into the hollow five man-heights above me, an opening as wide as my armspan into the great tree.

  A kind of dull fury began to pound in me, a discomfort so great that my body rebelled against it. There was no thought connected to it at all. Something deeper and more ancient than thought did as it wished, and Peter did nothing to oppose it.

  My claws struck deep into the corky bark of the tree. My long, curved fangs gleamed in the lightning. Above me was a consternation of birds, and my pombi-self smiled in anticipation. I came through the opening into the hollow in a rush, a crunch of jaws, a flap of great p
aws catching this and that flutterer, to make a leisurely meal of warm flesh as I spat feathers out of the opening and watched the storm move away across the fax hills. When it was quiet, I curled into the dry hollow, pausing only to rip out a strip of rotted wood which made a small discomfort against my hide. I slept. It was warm within the tree, and the fury passed as the storm passed.

  I woke remembering this dimly, in my own body shape, naked as an egg. Below me the remains of my pack lay on the ground. A few straps and buckles. A knife. Beside me in the hole was the pouch in which the Gamesmen of Barish were stored. Evidently even in fury I had not let them go. I went down the tree as I had come up it, pombi-style, the pouch between my teeth. Once on the ground, however, I became Peter once more, furred-Peter, with a pocket in the fur to hold the Gamesmen. It was no great matter. I wondered then, as I have since, why it took so long to think of it or decide to do it. The knife would have fitted into the pocket as well, but I left it where it lay. The pombi claws would cut as well.

  As the sun rose higher and warmer, my fur grew shorter exeept upon the legs and feet where it was needed as protection against the stones and briars. When it grew cool with evening,

  fur became long again. The body did it. Peter did not need to think of it. The body thought of longer legs on occasion, as well, and of arms which were variably long to pick whatever fruits were ripe. That day late better than in many days past. No fruit tore itself screaming from my hands. No fish or bird turned into a monster over my fire. Some things I let alone, and the body knew which. After a time, the eyes knew, also, and then the brain.

  There were trees one did not approach, hills one stayed away from, roads one did not step upon. There were others which were hospitable, or merely "real." There were artifacts in Schlaizy Noithn. Monuments. Cenotaphs. Monstrous menhirs which looked as though they had been erected in the dawn of time. Some had been put there by people. Gamesmen, perhaps. Or pawns. Some were Shifters, beings like myself (or so I thought) in the act of creation. I learned to trust the body's feeling about these places. If they were "real" then I might explore or take shelter there. If they were not, it were far better to stay a comfortable distance away. I did not yet know of other kinds of things, neither real nor Shifter, kinds of things my body would not warn me of. What betrayed me to one of these was simply loneliness.