MOST PEOPLE BELIEVED THAT THEY WOULD EVENTUALLY
go to heaven, even the ones whom everybody else knew would never
make it. Very few, however, believed they could get there without
dying.
The mountain had always fascinated him, but he had never really
understood the awe and fear it inspired in almost everyone else.
The Mountain of the Gods, the Cheyenne called it, and to be sure it
was peculiar.
Enormous, it had a conical, volcanic shape although it was not,
nor had it ever been, a volcano. It rose up in the center of
lesser, ordinary mountains, straight into the sky itself. None had
ever seen its peak and lived to tell about it, for even on the
clearest of days a dense ring of clouds shrouded its top from view.
The clouds moved around the peak, usually clockwise, and sometimes
seemed to swirl and boil as they did so, but the great cloud ring
never dissipated, never thinned, and never revealed what was beyond
the five-and-a-half-kilometer mark.
Certainly there was good reason for the people of the region to
both fear and worship the mountain. It looked different, it behaved
differently, and it had been there for as long as any of the People
could remember. Why he felt more fascination than fear, and had
felt that way even as a child, he couldn’t say, although he
had always been somewhat different from others.
He was a Human Being—what the subhumans of other nations
called a Cheyenne—and he was a hunter, a warrior, and an
adult of some rank. He shared his people’s mystic sense of
being one with nature, of the tangible and spiritual
interrelationships between human and nature, and accepted most of
what he had been taught. He did not, however, believe that gods
lived inside mountains.
Both his chief and his medicine man knew of his obsession with
the mountain, but they were unable to sway him. They argued that
none who had ever dared to climb the sacred mountain had returned
and that the spirits guarding its slopes were of the most powerful
sort. He believed in spirits and in sacred ground, but he could not
believe that the mountain was a part of this. The mythology alone
was too new, by the way his people measured time, and quite
unconvincing. He also knew that there were things of Heaven and
things of Nature and things of men, and the mountain had always
seemed to him to be the last of these, the legends and stories
deliberately spread to prevent any questioning of the
mountain’s existence. It was on the People’s land, but
it was not a part of the People, nor had it been there in ancient
times, as had the other mountains.
What the others saw as supernatural, he saw as insult and,
perhaps, as sacrilege.
“We hunt the buffalo and deer, and we manage the land well
for the Creator,” the medicine man noted. “It is a good
life we have here, a precious thing. The mountain is a part of
things, that’s all.”
“It is not a part of things,” the rebel
argued. “It is unnatural but not supernatural. I know as well
as you what it is like for those in the Council. There they live
not by nature and the skill of their inner and outer selves but
rather by machines and artifices. Everyone knows this, for they
must return to us for a season every two years. This mountain is
neither of god nor nature, but of men. You are a wise man. Surely
in your heart you know this.”
“I know many things,” the medicine man replied.
“I am not saying that you are not correct in this, but
correct does not necessarily mean that you are right. You know,
too, that the Creator once punished us for our pride and subjugated
us not even to the subhumans but to demons with white faces who
slaughtered the buffalo, slaughtered the People, and contained the
rest on worthless land, condemning us to a living hell in which our
very way of life was made impossible. Most of the white demons have
been carried off now to the stars, and the rest given their own
domain far across the Eastern Sea, but they left many works of evil
here. You can still stand on peaks and see where they had blasted
great roads through the mountains, and you can still go to many
places and find the remains of their once-great cities.”
“Then you are saying that it is true.” The
words were spoken with a curious sort of smile. “That the
stories and legends of the mountain were created to keep people
away. It is in fact something created by creatures of Earth, not
heaven.”
“Creatures of Earth and hell,” the medicine man
spat. “It is a foul place. It is perhaps the doorway to hell
itself. Left alone, it does not bother us, and we do not disturb
it. What if you challenge it, and it devours you as it devoured the
few others who have gone to it? What is gained? And if you survive,
and if you let loose the hordes of evil demons that it might
imprison, then you might well bring down the wrath of the Creator
upon all of us once more. Then much is lost.”
“All that you say might be true, yet I will challenge it.
I will challenge it because it is there and because I choose
knowledge over cowering like some child in a summer storm, its
ignorance reinforcing its fear. It is the duty of Human Beings to
conquer fear, not be ruled by it, or we become less than the
subhumans. I respect the mountain, but I do not fear it, and there
is but one way to show that to the mountain and to the Creator who
raised us above all others in spirit. I do not accept your
argument. If I do not go, then I show fear and lose my own worth.
If I go and die, then I die in honor, in an act of courage. If I do
not go because it might loose some demons upon the People, then the
People as a whole will be subject to fear. If we allow ourselves to
be ruled by fear in anything, then we are not the true Human
Beings, the highest of creation, but are instead subject to
something else—fear of the unknown. And if we are subjected
to that, then we are subjugated and deserve nothing less, for if
fear can rule us in this, it can rule us in other things as
well.”
The medicine man sighed. “I always knew I should have
nominated you for Council training. You have the kind of mind for
it. It is too late for that now, I fear, and too late for you. Go.
Climb the mountain. Die with your honor and courage proven. I shall
lead the weeping and lamentations for you and for myself, for
erring in this way and having such a fine mind come to such a
purposeless end. I will argue no more fine points of logic with
you. There is a very thin line between stubbornness and stupidity,
and I cannot shift someone back who has crossed that line.
Go.”
The climb was dangerous but not difficult, which was all to the
best because his people had little in the way of metals and
metalworking, and he had to make do with rope and balance and sure
footing. He had been afraid that he would be ill-prepared, but the
slope was rough and craggy, and with patience and by trial and
error he found a sort of path upward.
He had dressed warmly, with fur-lined clothes made to stand the
toughest test and a hood and face mask to help keep out the
terrible cold even at this time of year. An experienced mountain
man, he also knew that the air would grow thinner as he made his
ascent and that he would have to take the climb very slowly to give
himself a chance to become acclimated to the altitude. He could
carry only so much water, but after a while snow would do. It would
have to, for his salt-packed rations caused great thirst and
dehydration.
As he grew closer to the great ring of clouds, he began to
wonder if in fact any of the others like him had ever even gotten
this far. There were snow slides and hidden crevasses here, and the
problems of weather, acclimation, and provisions would stop anyone
not totally prepared for them and fully experienced in
high-altitude work. The climb was not really difficult, but its
relative ease would fill a novice with confidence and cause him to
ignore the many other threats.
So far it had been like any other mountain that could be climbed
without piton or grappling hook, only taller. It looked neither as
regular nor as strange when one was on it as it did from afar, and
he began to wonder if indeed imagination might have played cruel
tricks on the People.
But there was still that swirling mass of thick, impenetrable
clouds that should not have been there, at least not all the time
and certainly not at that altitude. He might doubt his
preconceptions, but he did not doubt his resolve. He would go into
those clouds.
Still, he almost didn’t make it. Parts of him suffered
from frostbite, and it seemed at times as if his eyes would freeze
shut, but he finally made the base of the clouds. Here he knew he
would face the greatest of all the dangers, for he might wind up
moving blind in a freezing, swirling fog. He had always had the
suspicion, now a fear, that the mountain might end right at the
clouds and that he might well step off into space.
The clouds were dense, although not as much as
he’d feared, and he had some visibility, although the wind
was up, making every move treacherous. Still, there was no
mistaking the fact that these clouds were nothing of nature; the
air was suddenly relatively warm—above freezing,
anyway—and he felt the pain of his frostbitten extremities
along with a welcome relief that the fine mist that soon covered
him remained a mist.
There was, however, a curious lack of odor. The clouds were
getting their heat from somewhere, yet there were none of the
earth-fumes he would have expected from a volcanic area. He
continued his climb and was shocked to break out of the clouds only
twenty or thirty meters up from their start. It was not the end of
the clouds; really, but rather a break between two layers of cloud,
formed by a trapped mass of warm air. Above him swirled a solid
ceiling of clouds. He did not worry about them, though; the
mountain did not extend any farther than a dozen meters, beyond the
end of the lower cloud barrier.
Up here it did at least look like a volcano, one of
those great mountains of the west. The summit was a crater and
appeared perfectly round, but it was less than a hundred meters
across. It was as unnatural as were the clouds and the warmth. It
was certainly the source of the heat: The air seemed to shimmer all
around that basin. Laboriously he made his way, half walking, half
crawling, to the edge, and with hurting eyes he peered down inside
and froze in awe and wonder, his jaw dropping. For a moment he
wondered if the climb had cost him his reason. Faces . . . Huge faces coming out of the
rock wall and extending all the way around the crater. Men’s
faces, women’s faces, strange-looking, alien faces none of
which seemed to have the features of the People. Demon faces.
Giant faces extended out of the crater wall, carved of some
whitish rock or some other substance. The noses alone were eight or
more meters long; the mouths, though closed now and expressionless,
looked as if they each could swallow a herd of buffalo. Who carved such faces? he wondered. And
why?
About forty meters below the faces was a floor that appeared to
be made of very coarse cloth, although he was sophisticated enough
to realize that it must be metal. The fine mesh of the grating
allowed the warm air to rise from inside the mountain, creating the
odd cloud effects and giving the region of the peak its moderate
temperature. The mesh grate also had five circles painted on it,
four in a sort of square surrounding a fifth in the middle, and
there were designs in each circle. He could not make out the
designs, partly because of the distance and the condition of his
eyes and partly because there seemed to be material covering parts
of all five circles. The material, whatever it was, was randomly
scattered about and certainly not native to the place.
He stared again at the giant carved faces and felt a chill go
through him. They were certainly both mysterious and awesome; most
people who made it this far would worship them, knowing they had
seen the faces of the sleeping spirits of the mountain. He counted
twenty-five faces around the rim just inside the crater, all
expressionless, all seemingly asleep, eyes closed. With a start he
realized that there weren’t twenty-five different faces but
only five, each repeated four more times.
There was the man with short, curly hair, thick lips, and a
broad, flat nose. There was a chubby, elderly-looking woman with
puffy cheeks and short, stringy hair. There was a younger, prettier
woman with a delicate face whose features in some ways resembled
that of his own people but whose eyes seemed oddly slanted, almost
catlike. There was a very old man with wrinkled skin and very
little hair. And, last, there was a strange-looking man with a very
long face, a lantern jaw, and a birdlike nose.
Each of these was repeated so that the same five, had their eyes
been open, would have been looking out, or down, at any point
within.
Who were they? The ones who built this place? If so, why had
they built it, and why here, and what was the source of the warmth
below? Had they built this place and then added these faces as a
monument to their work, a permanent sort of memorial? Would that
question ever be answerable?
He paused, trying to decide what to do next. He’d
challenged the mountain and won, and proved his point, but now
what? He’d never taken it any further than this. Now it
seemed idiotic to return below, reversing the climb, facing even
more dangers in the descent than in the ascent if only because,
going down, one was always a bit careless compared to facing the
unknown ascent. To go down and say what? That there were
twenty-five huge carved heads of five sleeping men and women in a
crater, and below them a huge net through which blew warm air?
Would he even be believed? Would he believe this sight if
he weren’t now seeing it, and would he believe an account of
it if teller and listener were reversed? Now what?
He needed something tangible to take from this place. He needed
more than just this bizarre vision.
He needed to go down there.
But could he? Was there any place here to fasten a rope
securely? Was his rope long enough and strong enough to bear him
down and back out again?
He walked carefully around the crater until he spied something
sticking out of the ground perhaps a meter and a half from the rim.
He went to it and then stopped.
It was a metal stake. A piton, driven expertly into the rock and
still containing the rotting remains of the rope knot, although not
the rope itself. He was not the first to make it up here, that was
clear, and he was not the first to consider the descent into that
place.
The piton had not been traded from one of the metal-working
nations: Although rusted, it was too smooth, too regular, too
exact, and too strong. This was a thing of machines, of Council
origin or higher. The rope, too, seemed strange and far too thick
and complex to be handmade.
He flattened himself, crawled along the line to the edge, and
looked down between the old man’s face and the face of the
woman with the strange-looking eyes. What had happened? Had the
rope rubbed against the crater rim and worn through? He thought
again of the indistinct litter on the mesh floor below and
sighed.
Rope. Rope remains—and human remains as well. Skeletal
remains. All the others who had made it this far were still
here.
This place, then, was some sort of trap. No, traps had been set,
but this was far too elaborate to be established simply as a trap.
These faces, then, represented the spirits set to guard whatever
was down there. What powerful thing could be down there that would
make people take such a risk?
He peered down, straining to see. Nothing on the grating,
certainly; either the object of his search was below that grate, or
there was some way in—a door or something. He saw what looked
like a fresco, a design built into the wall at about a meter and a
half above the grating. He made his way carefully around the rim,
but there was only this one thing on the walls, nothing more.
Otherwise, the pit was plain and featureless.
The faces were not to be trusted. Their features could hide
almost anything; the eyes might open to reveal ports for weapons.
However, the one who’d been able to use the piton had also
thought of this and have descended quite clearly between two faces.
Something had still cut the rope and dropped him to the grate
below. The pit represented power—but the pit was also death.
He was smart enough to know that going down in ignorance was no
test of honor or courage, just stupidity. He backed off, then lay
there and relaxed for a while and checked his provisions. There was
little left, despite his careful rationing. It had taken five
careful days to get this far, but it might well take two equally
careful days to get back down.
He knew, though, that he would not tempt the pit. Perhaps
others, someday, hearing of it, would explain it to him or give him
its mysterious key, but he did not have it. To descend to the grate
was death, either quick from falling or slow by being trapped down
there with only corpses and statue faces for company.
He settled back and decided to get some sleep before attempting
any real move back down to his own domains below. He was quite
tired, and the warmth of the air beguiled him into rest, but he did
not sleep easily. He dreamed, and the dream was a terrible one. He was standing in the pit, looking up at the far-off
opening above. The faces were there, but they were no longer dead
faces but living things, eyes opened, looking down at him with
mixed amusement and contempt. He tried to look away and found himself deep in skeletons.
He backed off in horror but found his feet tangled in
ropes—his own and those of the dead—and fell with a
crash onto the grate, coming face to face with grinning skulls.
Skeletal hands on skeletal arms seemed to reach out for him. He
yelled and somehow pushed them away, then got up against a side
wall. He looked across and saw the inlaid panel clearly now. The
same five designs as were on the floor, but clear, with strange
symbols that looked very much like the cave and rock drawings done
by some of his own people. Inside each circle there seemed to be a
small black square, as if a single tile had been removed. The faces above now seemed to whisper to him with such force
that they stirred up a great wind. They were not speaking his
language, yet he somehow understood what they were saying. “The rings . . . The
rings . . . The five gold rings,” they
whispered to him. “Do you have the rings?” “What rings are these?” he heard himself
shouting. “I know of no rings!” “He doesn’t have the rings,” one of the
male figures whispered, and the other male faces took it up.
“No rings. No rings. He comes without the
rings.” “No fruit, no birds, no rings,” the female faces
chimed in. “Then why do you come?” the male faces asked
him. “I come only to see what is here, to know why this
mountain exists on my people’s sacred land! I wish nothing
else!” There was a collective sigh from the faces.
“We’re sorry,” they all responded, their voices
echoing eerily around the pit. “We’re so very sorry.
But, you see, reconnaissance is not allowed.” And then the skeletons, those remains of the ones who have
come before, stirred, and they seemed to come together and reach
out for him, to make him one of
them . . .
He awoke with a start, feeling the chilled sweat caused by the
dream. The wind was up, and it seemed to be getting colder. The
queer cloud cap above whirled at impossible speed, and the one
below seemed to match it. He got hurriedly to his feet, not really
thinking of anything but getting out of this place, getting away.
It was neither cowardice nor a loss of honor to leave; this was
beyond his power, an evil place of magic that would take far more
than a warrior to combat. There was no honor in suicide, and that
was what it was to remain here.
Although it was growing late in the day and the region below was
bound to be bitterly cold, he did not hesitate to make his way down
as far as he could. He quickly reached the swirling mass of clouds
below and entered them, and was immediately engulfed in a
maelstrom.
The winds were so powerful and so loud that they masked his
scream as they blew him off the mountainside, hurling his body
hundreds of meters straight down to the nearest rocks below.
MOST PEOPLE BELIEVED THAT THEY WOULD EVENTUALLY
go to heaven, even the ones whom everybody else knew would never
make it. Very few, however, believed they could get there without
dying.
The mountain had always fascinated him, but he had never really
understood the awe and fear it inspired in almost everyone else.
The Mountain of the Gods, the Cheyenne called it, and to be sure it
was peculiar.
Enormous, it had a conical, volcanic shape although it was not,
nor had it ever been, a volcano. It rose up in the center of
lesser, ordinary mountains, straight into the sky itself. None had
ever seen its peak and lived to tell about it, for even on the
clearest of days a dense ring of clouds shrouded its top from view.
The clouds moved around the peak, usually clockwise, and sometimes
seemed to swirl and boil as they did so, but the great cloud ring
never dissipated, never thinned, and never revealed what was beyond
the five-and-a-half-kilometer mark.
Certainly there was good reason for the people of the region to
both fear and worship the mountain. It looked different, it behaved
differently, and it had been there for as long as any of the People
could remember. Why he felt more fascination than fear, and had
felt that way even as a child, he couldn’t say, although he
had always been somewhat different from others.
He was a Human Being—what the subhumans of other nations
called a Cheyenne—and he was a hunter, a warrior, and an
adult of some rank. He shared his people’s mystic sense of
being one with nature, of the tangible and spiritual
interrelationships between human and nature, and accepted most of
what he had been taught. He did not, however, believe that gods
lived inside mountains.
Both his chief and his medicine man knew of his obsession with
the mountain, but they were unable to sway him. They argued that
none who had ever dared to climb the sacred mountain had returned
and that the spirits guarding its slopes were of the most powerful
sort. He believed in spirits and in sacred ground, but he could not
believe that the mountain was a part of this. The mythology alone
was too new, by the way his people measured time, and quite
unconvincing. He also knew that there were things of Heaven and
things of Nature and things of men, and the mountain had always
seemed to him to be the last of these, the legends and stories
deliberately spread to prevent any questioning of the
mountain’s existence. It was on the People’s land, but
it was not a part of the People, nor had it been there in ancient
times, as had the other mountains.
What the others saw as supernatural, he saw as insult and,
perhaps, as sacrilege.
“We hunt the buffalo and deer, and we manage the land well
for the Creator,” the medicine man noted. “It is a good
life we have here, a precious thing. The mountain is a part of
things, that’s all.”
“It is not a part of things,” the rebel
argued. “It is unnatural but not supernatural. I know as well
as you what it is like for those in the Council. There they live
not by nature and the skill of their inner and outer selves but
rather by machines and artifices. Everyone knows this, for they
must return to us for a season every two years. This mountain is
neither of god nor nature, but of men. You are a wise man. Surely
in your heart you know this.”
“I know many things,” the medicine man replied.
“I am not saying that you are not correct in this, but
correct does not necessarily mean that you are right. You know,
too, that the Creator once punished us for our pride and subjugated
us not even to the subhumans but to demons with white faces who
slaughtered the buffalo, slaughtered the People, and contained the
rest on worthless land, condemning us to a living hell in which our
very way of life was made impossible. Most of the white demons have
been carried off now to the stars, and the rest given their own
domain far across the Eastern Sea, but they left many works of evil
here. You can still stand on peaks and see where they had blasted
great roads through the mountains, and you can still go to many
places and find the remains of their once-great cities.”
“Then you are saying that it is true.” The
words were spoken with a curious sort of smile. “That the
stories and legends of the mountain were created to keep people
away. It is in fact something created by creatures of Earth, not
heaven.”
“Creatures of Earth and hell,” the medicine man
spat. “It is a foul place. It is perhaps the doorway to hell
itself. Left alone, it does not bother us, and we do not disturb
it. What if you challenge it, and it devours you as it devoured the
few others who have gone to it? What is gained? And if you survive,
and if you let loose the hordes of evil demons that it might
imprison, then you might well bring down the wrath of the Creator
upon all of us once more. Then much is lost.”
“All that you say might be true, yet I will challenge it.
I will challenge it because it is there and because I choose
knowledge over cowering like some child in a summer storm, its
ignorance reinforcing its fear. It is the duty of Human Beings to
conquer fear, not be ruled by it, or we become less than the
subhumans. I respect the mountain, but I do not fear it, and there
is but one way to show that to the mountain and to the Creator who
raised us above all others in spirit. I do not accept your
argument. If I do not go, then I show fear and lose my own worth.
If I go and die, then I die in honor, in an act of courage. If I do
not go because it might loose some demons upon the People, then the
People as a whole will be subject to fear. If we allow ourselves to
be ruled by fear in anything, then we are not the true Human
Beings, the highest of creation, but are instead subject to
something else—fear of the unknown. And if we are subjected
to that, then we are subjugated and deserve nothing less, for if
fear can rule us in this, it can rule us in other things as
well.”
The medicine man sighed. “I always knew I should have
nominated you for Council training. You have the kind of mind for
it. It is too late for that now, I fear, and too late for you. Go.
Climb the mountain. Die with your honor and courage proven. I shall
lead the weeping and lamentations for you and for myself, for
erring in this way and having such a fine mind come to such a
purposeless end. I will argue no more fine points of logic with
you. There is a very thin line between stubbornness and stupidity,
and I cannot shift someone back who has crossed that line.
Go.”
The climb was dangerous but not difficult, which was all to the
best because his people had little in the way of metals and
metalworking, and he had to make do with rope and balance and sure
footing. He had been afraid that he would be ill-prepared, but the
slope was rough and craggy, and with patience and by trial and
error he found a sort of path upward.
He had dressed warmly, with fur-lined clothes made to stand the
toughest test and a hood and face mask to help keep out the
terrible cold even at this time of year. An experienced mountain
man, he also knew that the air would grow thinner as he made his
ascent and that he would have to take the climb very slowly to give
himself a chance to become acclimated to the altitude. He could
carry only so much water, but after a while snow would do. It would
have to, for his salt-packed rations caused great thirst and
dehydration.
As he grew closer to the great ring of clouds, he began to
wonder if in fact any of the others like him had ever even gotten
this far. There were snow slides and hidden crevasses here, and the
problems of weather, acclimation, and provisions would stop anyone
not totally prepared for them and fully experienced in
high-altitude work. The climb was not really difficult, but its
relative ease would fill a novice with confidence and cause him to
ignore the many other threats.
So far it had been like any other mountain that could be climbed
without piton or grappling hook, only taller. It looked neither as
regular nor as strange when one was on it as it did from afar, and
he began to wonder if indeed imagination might have played cruel
tricks on the People.
But there was still that swirling mass of thick, impenetrable
clouds that should not have been there, at least not all the time
and certainly not at that altitude. He might doubt his
preconceptions, but he did not doubt his resolve. He would go into
those clouds.
Still, he almost didn’t make it. Parts of him suffered
from frostbite, and it seemed at times as if his eyes would freeze
shut, but he finally made the base of the clouds. Here he knew he
would face the greatest of all the dangers, for he might wind up
moving blind in a freezing, swirling fog. He had always had the
suspicion, now a fear, that the mountain might end right at the
clouds and that he might well step off into space.
The clouds were dense, although not as much as
he’d feared, and he had some visibility, although the wind
was up, making every move treacherous. Still, there was no
mistaking the fact that these clouds were nothing of nature; the
air was suddenly relatively warm—above freezing,
anyway—and he felt the pain of his frostbitten extremities
along with a welcome relief that the fine mist that soon covered
him remained a mist.
There was, however, a curious lack of odor. The clouds were
getting their heat from somewhere, yet there were none of the
earth-fumes he would have expected from a volcanic area. He
continued his climb and was shocked to break out of the clouds only
twenty or thirty meters up from their start. It was not the end of
the clouds; really, but rather a break between two layers of cloud,
formed by a trapped mass of warm air. Above him swirled a solid
ceiling of clouds. He did not worry about them, though; the
mountain did not extend any farther than a dozen meters, beyond the
end of the lower cloud barrier.
Up here it did at least look like a volcano, one of
those great mountains of the west. The summit was a crater and
appeared perfectly round, but it was less than a hundred meters
across. It was as unnatural as were the clouds and the warmth. It
was certainly the source of the heat: The air seemed to shimmer all
around that basin. Laboriously he made his way, half walking, half
crawling, to the edge, and with hurting eyes he peered down inside
and froze in awe and wonder, his jaw dropping. For a moment he
wondered if the climb had cost him his reason. Faces . . . Huge faces coming out of the
rock wall and extending all the way around the crater. Men’s
faces, women’s faces, strange-looking, alien faces none of
which seemed to have the features of the People. Demon faces.
Giant faces extended out of the crater wall, carved of some
whitish rock or some other substance. The noses alone were eight or
more meters long; the mouths, though closed now and expressionless,
looked as if they each could swallow a herd of buffalo. Who carved such faces? he wondered. And
why?
About forty meters below the faces was a floor that appeared to
be made of very coarse cloth, although he was sophisticated enough
to realize that it must be metal. The fine mesh of the grating
allowed the warm air to rise from inside the mountain, creating the
odd cloud effects and giving the region of the peak its moderate
temperature. The mesh grate also had five circles painted on it,
four in a sort of square surrounding a fifth in the middle, and
there were designs in each circle. He could not make out the
designs, partly because of the distance and the condition of his
eyes and partly because there seemed to be material covering parts
of all five circles. The material, whatever it was, was randomly
scattered about and certainly not native to the place.
He stared again at the giant carved faces and felt a chill go
through him. They were certainly both mysterious and awesome; most
people who made it this far would worship them, knowing they had
seen the faces of the sleeping spirits of the mountain. He counted
twenty-five faces around the rim just inside the crater, all
expressionless, all seemingly asleep, eyes closed. With a start he
realized that there weren’t twenty-five different faces but
only five, each repeated four more times.
There was the man with short, curly hair, thick lips, and a
broad, flat nose. There was a chubby, elderly-looking woman with
puffy cheeks and short, stringy hair. There was a younger, prettier
woman with a delicate face whose features in some ways resembled
that of his own people but whose eyes seemed oddly slanted, almost
catlike. There was a very old man with wrinkled skin and very
little hair. And, last, there was a strange-looking man with a very
long face, a lantern jaw, and a birdlike nose.
Each of these was repeated so that the same five, had their eyes
been open, would have been looking out, or down, at any point
within.
Who were they? The ones who built this place? If so, why had
they built it, and why here, and what was the source of the warmth
below? Had they built this place and then added these faces as a
monument to their work, a permanent sort of memorial? Would that
question ever be answerable?
He paused, trying to decide what to do next. He’d
challenged the mountain and won, and proved his point, but now
what? He’d never taken it any further than this. Now it
seemed idiotic to return below, reversing the climb, facing even
more dangers in the descent than in the ascent if only because,
going down, one was always a bit careless compared to facing the
unknown ascent. To go down and say what? That there were
twenty-five huge carved heads of five sleeping men and women in a
crater, and below them a huge net through which blew warm air?
Would he even be believed? Would he believe this sight if
he weren’t now seeing it, and would he believe an account of
it if teller and listener were reversed? Now what?
He needed something tangible to take from this place. He needed
more than just this bizarre vision.
He needed to go down there.
But could he? Was there any place here to fasten a rope
securely? Was his rope long enough and strong enough to bear him
down and back out again?
He walked carefully around the crater until he spied something
sticking out of the ground perhaps a meter and a half from the rim.
He went to it and then stopped.
It was a metal stake. A piton, driven expertly into the rock and
still containing the rotting remains of the rope knot, although not
the rope itself. He was not the first to make it up here, that was
clear, and he was not the first to consider the descent into that
place.
The piton had not been traded from one of the metal-working
nations: Although rusted, it was too smooth, too regular, too
exact, and too strong. This was a thing of machines, of Council
origin or higher. The rope, too, seemed strange and far too thick
and complex to be handmade.
He flattened himself, crawled along the line to the edge, and
looked down between the old man’s face and the face of the
woman with the strange-looking eyes. What had happened? Had the
rope rubbed against the crater rim and worn through? He thought
again of the indistinct litter on the mesh floor below and
sighed.
Rope. Rope remains—and human remains as well. Skeletal
remains. All the others who had made it this far were still
here.
This place, then, was some sort of trap. No, traps had been set,
but this was far too elaborate to be established simply as a trap.
These faces, then, represented the spirits set to guard whatever
was down there. What powerful thing could be down there that would
make people take such a risk?
He peered down, straining to see. Nothing on the grating,
certainly; either the object of his search was below that grate, or
there was some way in—a door or something. He saw what looked
like a fresco, a design built into the wall at about a meter and a
half above the grating. He made his way carefully around the rim,
but there was only this one thing on the walls, nothing more.
Otherwise, the pit was plain and featureless.
The faces were not to be trusted. Their features could hide
almost anything; the eyes might open to reveal ports for weapons.
However, the one who’d been able to use the piton had also
thought of this and have descended quite clearly between two faces.
Something had still cut the rope and dropped him to the grate
below. The pit represented power—but the pit was also death.
He was smart enough to know that going down in ignorance was no
test of honor or courage, just stupidity. He backed off, then lay
there and relaxed for a while and checked his provisions. There was
little left, despite his careful rationing. It had taken five
careful days to get this far, but it might well take two equally
careful days to get back down.
He knew, though, that he would not tempt the pit. Perhaps
others, someday, hearing of it, would explain it to him or give him
its mysterious key, but he did not have it. To descend to the grate
was death, either quick from falling or slow by being trapped down
there with only corpses and statue faces for company.
He settled back and decided to get some sleep before attempting
any real move back down to his own domains below. He was quite
tired, and the warmth of the air beguiled him into rest, but he did
not sleep easily. He dreamed, and the dream was a terrible one. He was standing in the pit, looking up at the far-off
opening above. The faces were there, but they were no longer dead
faces but living things, eyes opened, looking down at him with
mixed amusement and contempt. He tried to look away and found himself deep in skeletons.
He backed off in horror but found his feet tangled in
ropes—his own and those of the dead—and fell with a
crash onto the grate, coming face to face with grinning skulls.
Skeletal hands on skeletal arms seemed to reach out for him. He
yelled and somehow pushed them away, then got up against a side
wall. He looked across and saw the inlaid panel clearly now. The
same five designs as were on the floor, but clear, with strange
symbols that looked very much like the cave and rock drawings done
by some of his own people. Inside each circle there seemed to be a
small black square, as if a single tile had been removed. The faces above now seemed to whisper to him with such force
that they stirred up a great wind. They were not speaking his
language, yet he somehow understood what they were saying. “The rings . . . The
rings . . . The five gold rings,” they
whispered to him. “Do you have the rings?” “What rings are these?” he heard himself
shouting. “I know of no rings!” “He doesn’t have the rings,” one of the
male figures whispered, and the other male faces took it up.
“No rings. No rings. He comes without the
rings.” “No fruit, no birds, no rings,” the female faces
chimed in. “Then why do you come?” the male faces asked
him. “I come only to see what is here, to know why this
mountain exists on my people’s sacred land! I wish nothing
else!” There was a collective sigh from the faces.
“We’re sorry,” they all responded, their voices
echoing eerily around the pit. “We’re so very sorry.
But, you see, reconnaissance is not allowed.” And then the skeletons, those remains of the ones who have
come before, stirred, and they seemed to come together and reach
out for him, to make him one of
them . . .
He awoke with a start, feeling the chilled sweat caused by the
dream. The wind was up, and it seemed to be getting colder. The
queer cloud cap above whirled at impossible speed, and the one
below seemed to match it. He got hurriedly to his feet, not really
thinking of anything but getting out of this place, getting away.
It was neither cowardice nor a loss of honor to leave; this was
beyond his power, an evil place of magic that would take far more
than a warrior to combat. There was no honor in suicide, and that
was what it was to remain here.
Although it was growing late in the day and the region below was
bound to be bitterly cold, he did not hesitate to make his way down
as far as he could. He quickly reached the swirling mass of clouds
below and entered them, and was immediately engulfed in a
maelstrom.
The winds were so powerful and so loud that they masked his
scream as they blew him off the mountainside, hurling his body
hundreds of meters straight down to the nearest rocks below.