LITMIR.BIZ

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a place where there’s a perpetual funeral going on?

      Winter was coming on, however, and I had a place to sleep and a fire to keep me warm, and the old people kept me well-fed, so I decided that I could stand a little depression. I made up my mind, though, that I’d be gone with the first hint of spring.

      I made no particular effort to learn their language that winter, and picked up only a few words. The most continually repeated among them were ‘Gorim’ and ‘UL,’ which seemed to be names of some sort, and were almost always spoken in tones of profoundest regret.

      In addition to feeding me, the old people provided me with clothing; my own hadn’t been very good in the first place, and had become badly worn during the course of my journey. This involved no great sacrifice on their part, since a community in which there are two or three funerals every few weeks is bound to have spare clothes lying about.

      When the snow melted and the frost began to seep out of the ground, I quietly began to make preparations to leave. I stole food – a little at a time to avoid suspicion – and hid it in my tent. I filched a rather nice wool cloak from the tent of one of the recently deceased and picked up a few other useful items here and there. I scouted the surrounding area carefully and found a place where I could ford the large river just to the west of the encampment. Then, with my escape route firmly in mind, I settled down to wait for the last of winter to pass.

      As is usual in the early spring, we had a couple of weeks of fairly steady rain, so I still waited, although my impatience to be gone was becoming almost unbearable. During the course of that winter, that peculiar compulsion that had nagged at me since I’d left Gara had subtly altered. Now I seemed to be drawn southward instead of to the west.

      The rains finally let up, and the spring sun seemed warm enough to make traveling pleasant, and so one evening I gathered up the fruits of my pilferage, stowed them in the rude pack I’d fashioned during the long winter evenings, and sat in my tent listening in almost breathless anticipation as the sounds in the camp of the old people gradually subsided. Then, when all was quiet, I crept out of my temporary home and made for the edge of the woods.

      The moon was full that night, and the stars seemed very bright. I crept through the shadowy woods, waded the river, and emerged on the other side filled with a sense of enormous exhilaration. I was free!

      I followed the river southward for the better part of that night, putting as much distance as I possibly could between me and the old people – enough certainly so that their creaky old limbs would not permit them to follow.

      The forest seemed incredibly old. The trees were huge, and the forest floor, all overspread by that leafy green canopy, was devoid of the usual underbrush, carpeted instead with lush green moss. It seemed to me an enchanted forest, and once I was certain there would be no pursuit, I found that I wasn’t really in any great hurry, so I strolled – sauntered if you will – southward with no real sense of urgency, aside from that now-gentle compulsion to go someplace, and I hadn’t really the faintest idea of where.

      And then, the land opened up. What had been forest became a kind of vale, a grassy basin dotted here and there with delightful groves of trees verged with thickets of lush berry-bushes, centering around deep, cold springs of water so clear that I could look down through ten feet of it at trout, which, all unafraid, looked up curiously at me as I knelt to drink.

      And deer, as placid and docile as sheep, grazed in the lush green meadows and watched with large and gentle eyes as I passed.

      All bemused, I wandered, more content than I had ever been. The distant voice of prudence told me that my store of food wouldn’t last forever, but it didn’t really seem to diminish – perhaps because I glutted myself on berries and other strange fruits.

      I lingered long in that magic vale, and in time I came to its very center, where there grew a tree so vast that my mind reeled at the immensity of it.

      I make no pretense at being a horticulturist, but I’ve been nine times around the world, and so far as I’ve seen, there’s no other tree like it anywhere. And, in what was probably a mistake, I went to the tree and laid my hands upon its rough bark. I’ve always wondered what might have happened if I had not.

      The peace that came over me was indescribable. My somewhat prosaic daughter will probably dismiss my bemusement as natural laziness, but she’ll be wrong about that. I have no idea of how long I sat in rapt communion with that ancient tree. I know that I must have been somehow nourished and sustained as hours, days, even months drifted by unnoticed, but I have no memory of ever eating or sleeping.

      And then, overnight, it turned cold and began to snow. Winter, like death, had been creeping up behind me all the while.

      I’d formulated a rather vague intention to return to the camp of the old people for another winter of pampering if nothing better turned up, but it was obvious that I’d lingered too long in the mesmerizing shade of that silly tree.

      And the snow piled so deep that I could barely flounder my way through it. And my food was gone, and my shoes wore out, and I lost my knife, and it suddenly turned very, very cold. I’m not making any accusations here, but it seemed to me that this was all just a little excessive.

      In the end, soaked to the skin and with ice forming in my hair, I huddled behind a pile of rock that seemed to reach up into the very heart of the snowstorm that swirled around me, and I tried to prepare myself for death. I thought of the village of Gara, and of the grassy fields around it, and of our sparkling river, and of my mother, and – because I was still really very young – I cried.

      ‘Why weepest thou, boy?’ The voice was very gentle. The snow was so thick that I couldn’t see who spoke, but the tone made me angry for some reason. Didn’t I have reason to cry?

      ‘Because I’m cold and I’m hungry,’ I replied, ‘and because I’m dying and I don’t want to.’

      ‘Why art thou dying? Art thou injured?’

      ‘I’m lost,’ I said a bit tartly, ‘and it’s snowing and I have no place to go.’ Was he blind?

      ‘Is this reason enough amongst thy kind to die?’

      ‘Isn’t it enough?’

      ‘And how long dost thou expect this dying of thine to persist?’ The voice seemed only mildly curious.

      ‘I don’t know,’ I replied through a sudden wave of self-pity. ‘I’ve never done it before.’

      The wind howled and the snow swirled more thickly around me.

      ‘Boy,’ the voice said finally, ‘come here to me.’

      ‘Where are you? I can’t see you.’

      ‘Walk around the tower to thy left. Knowest thou thy left hand from thy right?’

      He didn’t have to be so insulting! I stumbled angrily to my half-frozen feet, blinded by the driving snow.

      ‘Well, boy? Art thou coming?’

      I moved around what I thought was only a pile of rocks.

      ‘Thou shalt come to a smooth grey stone,’ the voice said. ‘It is somewhat taller than thy head and as broad as thine arms may reach.’

      ‘All right,’ I said through chattering teeth when I reached the rock he’d described, ‘now what?’

      ‘Tell it to open.’

      ‘What?’

      ‘Speak unto the stone,’ the voice said patiently, ignoring the fact that I was congealing in the gale. ‘Command it to open.’

      ‘Command? Me?’

      ‘Thou art a man. It is but a rock.’

      ‘What do I say?’

      ‘Tell it to open.’

      ‘I think this is silly, but I’ll try it.’ I faced the rock. ‘Open,’ I commanded half-heartedly.

      ‘Surely

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