He had no idea what the Moon’s Dream would mean in the unknown lands ahead of them. He had not heard the Monster say winter was colder in the mountains than on the plain. Probably it had told Bily when they were trapped in the cottage cellar together, or at the start of their journey – before the Monster had become so sleepy. It had talked to Bily often as he tended its hurts. Zluty did not doubt the Monster spoke the truth, but he couldn’t help thinking that it had never been on the plain in the winter and perhaps its idea of cold was shaped by its life in its own hot land.
In truth, Zluty would prefer to avoid the mountains altogether, but Bily would not change their route without the Monster’s agreement, and that could not be got until it woke. In any case, they needed the monster to explain exactly where the soft green land was. Zluty knew he ought to have found this out before they set off, but who would have guessed the Monster would sleep so much? Well, if they really were coming to the end of the desertlands and the Monster did not wake, he would have to talk to Bily about what they should do next. He pondered this until dawn came and he saw that the low cloud bank in the West had not moved at all.
Seeing Bily watching him anxiously, he said as heartily as he could, ‘Well, it can’t be another stone wind. That grew bigger day by day!’
‘But what sort of cloud bank does not move at all?’ Bily asked.
Before Zluty could answer him, the Monster spoke in its thick, dark voice. ‘Clouds that the mountains spawn and wear to hide themselves.’
Bily turned to the wagon with a cry of gladness. ‘Monster! I am so glad you have woken!’
‘I am weak,’ the Monster observed.
‘That is only because we could not give you anything to eat but water and thin gruel!’ Bily exclaimed. ‘I will get you something right now.’ He rushed around to the other side of the wagon to make his preparations.
The Monster turned its golden eyes on Zluty and said softly, so that he alone would hear, ‘It appears that life is not done with me, after all.’
Gathering his scattered wits, Zluty asked what it meant by clouds being spawned by mountains. ‘Mountains are not live things,’ he said in a voice that sounded rather accusing even to his own ears.
‘These mountains are split by deep cracks from which mists pour endlessly,’ the Monster answered. ‘My people call them The Clouded Mountains.’
‘We can avoid them since we have water now,’ Zluty suggested.
‘If you would reach the Vale of Bellflowers, you must travel first to the mountains,’ said the Monster, gazing at the distant cloudbank.
‘Surely we can go around,’ Zluty insisted, but the Monster seemed to have fallen into a waking trance.
‘It will be better once it has eaten a few meals,’ Bily murmured, when Zluty gave up and went to help him prepare its food.
When a stew of dried mushroom and tuber left over from their last meal had been hastily heated in the embers of the fire, Bily bid Zluty feed the Monster its portion, since he could not manage it with his sore hand. The Monster ate stoically, and Zluty tried again to question it about the hot land, but its eyes only drifted dreamily.
At the final spoonful it suddenly roused and sniffed at his fingers urgently. ‘I smell slish,’ it growled.
Zluty and Bily exchanged a startled look, then Zluty said, ‘Perhaps you are smelling the slime from the crevice walls.’ He had scoured his hands with sand and washed them with water, but the musty scent of the slime did seem to linger on his fingers.
‘Crevice?’ rumbled the Monster, its eyes flaring. ‘You entered a crevice?’
Bily told the tale, and Zluty watched the Monster closely, wanting to study its reaction to the news that there was water in the desert, when it had told them there was not.
The Monster shook its head and said, ‘I did not think of you being able to get the water from the crevices for they are too narrow for me to enter. Also, such openings are known to be the lair of the slishi. I ought to have warned you.’
It looked at Zluty and he had the queer feeling the Monster knew his doubts. But when it spoke, there was puzzled wonder in its voice.
‘I do not know how you were not devoured, for the hunger of the slishi is its essence and purpose. I have never heard of one waiting so long to attack if prey was within reach.’
Bily opened his mouth, no doubt to explain what the jewelled beetle had said about slugs hating the light, and about the shining skystones, but the Monster’s voice went dreamy again as it explained that its people believed slishi hatched deep in the heart of the earth where the hot mists were born, only coming to the surface when cracks were opened wide enough by the earth’s quakings.
Zluty frowned. The plain had occasionally quaked, a slight trembling rather like the twitch a digger gave when a tiny fly crawled over its fur, but he had never known it to quake violently enough to crack. Yet perhaps it had once done so, for were there not many cracks and crevices on the plain?
‘You do not sound as if you believe slishi come from deep in the earth,’ Bily said.
The Monster gave him a keen look. ‘It is not enough for me that a thing seems so, or has been believed to be so. I must know what is by seeing it for myself. In this, I am unlike my people, for whom faith in what is not seen or experienced is a way of life. My mother and father despaired of me.’
There was a bitter note in its voice and Zluty wondered at this. Mother and Father were the names it used for the particular male and female of its kind that had given it life, even as a digger male and female gave life to their younglings. All other creatures were born of eggs, either soft thin eggs that cracked open like a broken clay water bulb, or metal eggs that opened at the seam, such as the one he and Bily had come from.
The Monster sighed heavily and Bily regarded it with pity, and said that it might be best if they stayed camping a day or two, so it could rest.
The Monster lifted its head, eyes flaring. ‘There is no time to rest. We must get beyond the Clouded Mountains before winter comes.’
Zluty wanted to say winter had already begun by his reckoning, but the Monster laid its head down again and its eyes drooped closed.
They went on. Zluty had wanted to insist they veer North or South to avoid the mountains, if indeed there were mountains beneath the cloudbank, but Bily could be impossibly stubborn when he made his mind up about something, and he was determined that they would do what the Monster advised. Zluty resolved to speak sternly to the Monster when it woke again. In the meantime, there was nothing but to continue West, towards the cloudbank.
As the day progressed the cloudbank seemed to stretch ever further North and South. To begin with, the bright sun beat down on the sand as painfully as ever, but at midday, a faint haze rose and it was suddenly cooler. For the first time since they had entered the desertlands, neither of them suggested stopping other than briefly to eat and drink.
As he walked, Zluty tried to imagine what the Monster had described: the stony ground shuddering and quaking and cracking open to form crevices or to rear up jaggedly into mountains. Then he imagined clouds of heat flowing out of the cracks into the cooler air, becoming a cloudbank that shrouded the mountains.
Overhead, Redwing glided, seemingly untroubled by the change in the air. Zluty wished he had been able to ask her what she had seen on her flights ahead of them, but even when Bily tried to question her, he had been unable to make sense of her explanation. Gazing up at her, it struck Zluty now that she was elated by their journey West.
Mindful of the Monster’s urgency, he did not call a proper halt until night fell, and even then they continued for some time, their way lit by the soft, tarnished glow of the blue moon. When they did finally stop, it was because Bily wanted to give water to the Monster, who was once again sleeping deeply. Its paw had begun to swell again and he was afraid the wound had got sand in it. The Monster had not stirred once during the afternoon, yet when Bily drew near, it lifted its head and bared its terrible teeth.
‘I car
e nothing for the Makers,’ it snarled. ‘Everything we do and think and say serves their cursed plan, yet where are they? I have never seen them. What if they have abandoned their plan and us?’
‘It is dreaming,’ Zluty whispered to Bily.
The Monster’s ears twitched and Zluty thought it had heard him, but it only went on sharply. ‘The offerings prove nothing. They are sent but none can say if they are received. As to the messages we receive – their meaning is the same year after year, despite being lavishly embroidered by each new listener. If you force me to this, I swear I will ask new questions and demand true answers.’
It had talked in its sleep before, but Zluty thought the Monster had never spoken with such passionate conviction.
‘What honour is there in a duty that is meaningless?’ it demanded, after another pause. ‘Choose another and free me to seek my own purpose.’ Abruptly it lay down its head and slept with no more sign of agitation than the soft grinding of its teeth.
‘It is fevered,’ Bily said worriedly. He looked at Zluty. ‘Let us make camp here for the night. We have to stop sooner or later to rest, and we have walked all day. I must bathe its paw and coat it in the cactus salve.’
Zluty was glad to stop, for he was not eager to reach the mountains. He made a fire and tended Bily’s hand. But when he went to help him with the Monster, it was sleeping in such a way that they could not get at its wound without disturbing it.
‘Let’s leave it until morning,’ Zluty said, and together they prepared a simple meal. He found comfort in the familiar routines of setting up camp, and perhaps it was the same for Bily because by the time they sat down to eat their meal he looked less anxious.
But he must have been thinking of the Monster’s dream, because when he set his empty bowl aside, he said, ‘I think it ran away because it did not want to serve these Makers.’ He took out his mending bag and began to patch a threadbare section of the canopy he had taken down.
‘It told us there was a thing it was supposed to have, only it ran away instead of taking it,’ Zluty said.
Bily frowned but did not reply, and when he had finished fixing the canopy, they wrapped themselves in their blankets and slept.
Bily woke to darkness without any memory of falling asleep, but the position of the Moon’s Dream told him it was near morning, which meant he had slept most of the night. He sat up and stared at the great stretch of starless dark ahead that, in the daylight, was the cloudbank.
Unable to go back to sleep for the throbbing of his hand, Bily went to the wagon to make pan bread for breakfast. Then he noticed the Monster’s eyes were open and it suddenly said, ‘You must travel more quickly than this.’
‘Are you hungry?’ Bily asked, after clumsily fetching it water. He wanted to look at its paw, but knew he could not manage the wrappings alone. Yet he took heart from the fact that the Monster was awake and clear-headed. Perhaps the wound was all right. Though he thought there was a feverish glitter in its eyes.
‘It is sleeping,’ Zluty said from behind him, and Bily saw that he was right. The Monster had slipped back to sleep.
‘It woke for a moment again and said we must travel more quickly,’ Bily said. ‘Can you unwrap its paw so I can look at it?’
Zluty did so and they both stared in dismay at the swollen, weeping wound.
‘There might be a bit of blackclaw pincher in the wound that has got infected,’ Bily said. ‘I will have to lance it to get it out. We need a good hot fire to brew up a proper drawing poultice and the Monster will need to rest quietly for at least a day after.’
‘It will have to wait until we are out of the desert,’ Zluty said, and he began to roll up Bily’s bedding, urging him to stow the cooking things.
Bily reluctantly obeyed, quickly watering the plants he had transplanted from the crevice to the cracked bulbs, happy to see they were thriving.
Zluty was pleased when one of the bees emerged and buzzed sluggishly about the green plants, for he had not seen any of them stir for days. ‘I think they are on the verge of full winter hibernation,’ he said.
‘But they have been half asleep the whole time,’ Bily protested.
‘The stone storm probably upset them or maybe bees are like this when they don’t have a proper home,’ Zluty said.
They watched the bee blunder its way back into the bee queen’s jar, then Bily suggested making pan bread before the fire was extinguished and they could eat as they walked.
Once it was cooked they set off, the tow ropes fastened around their middles so they could use their hands to eat.
It was still night when they set off, but there was light enough from the Moon’s Dream to see by and before long the sun rose. It was a queer blighted dawn, for although they could see the sky and the sun, a whitish haze floated in the air, dimming the light. It was cooler again, too, and when it got lighter, Bily noted that the sand was streaked with black soil.
‘We must be getting close to the edge of the desert now,’ Zluty said.
He was right. By the time the sun climbed to its zenith, they could see in the distance where the desert ended, bone-white sand dunes lapping softly onto a flat, dark, broken land beyond. The mist in the air made it hard to see far and Bily wondered if it was the outer edge of the cloudbank which loomed directly ahead like an immense wall of mist.
The terrain beyond the desert, when they finally reached it, was flat. Spikes of black stone thrust up here and there through the soft earth like dark fangs, surrounded by a scatter of broken stone and boulders. There were also numerous crevices that Zluty eyed cautiously, but nothing at all grew in them or on the ground about them. Not even lichen or moss.
‘We can’t lance the Monster’s wound here,’ Zluty said.
Bily nodded glumly. Somehow he had imagined there would be things growing in the land on the other side of the desert, a few flowers, perhaps even trees. Never in his darkest imagining had he expected such bleakness. Yet the Monster had spoken of green and fertile lands further West, and so he forced himself to say cheerfully, ‘We should not judge this place by our first glimpse of it. Perhaps it will be less barren, closer to the mountains.’
By afternoon the cloud surrounded them and they could no longer see the desert behind them or the mountains ahead. The sun shone and the sky was blue, but it was as if they saw them through a thick swath of white cloth. The land was still black and broken and bare, and not a blade of grass grew, nor had they found any water. But the air was so heavy with moisture that their fur was spangled with tiny drops of water.
Redwing suddenly took to the air in the late afternoon, winging West, and Bily could only envy her, rising on her bright wings above the drear and melancholy land. But he told himself he ought not to grumble, for the Monster’s fever had eased in the cooler air. Unfortunately its paw was more swollen than ever and he was now convinced there was something in the wound.
‘Only let us find some safe, sheltered place with a bit of moss or even some lichen and I will lance it,’ he muttered to himself.
‘Look,’ Zluty said suddenly, pointing to one of the stone outcrops. Bily was puzzled by his excitement for they had already passed many such outcrops. Then he saw one of the metal objects that had littered their own plain. He had hardly noticed them at home, so accustomed had he been to their presence, but seeing one here gave him a shock, for they had seen none in the desertlands.
The object differed little from those on the plain, but most were cracked open so that a muddle of wires and small metal shapes spilled out onto the ground. Bily was reminded of Zluty’s dream of a giant metal egg filled with such workings, and he thought of the small metal egg his brother carried in his backpack. At first they had examined the egg every night, eager to see what would emerge from it. But it had never shown the slightest sign of opening and they had finally accepted that whatever lay inside had perished.
They passed several more of the outcrops where metal objects lay, and Bily wondered aloud why they were all bro
ken. Zluty said he supposed they had hit the sharp rock outcrops when they fell from the sky, but Bily thought it strange that so many objects would land on the rocks.
Zluty got out his reed pipe and began to play. The music started out being full of determined cheer, but soon it turned into a mournful, winding tune full of uneasy fits and starts. Usually Bily loved the sounds the pipe made, but this time he was not sorry when Zluty put it away.
When it grew dark again, Zluty called a halt and kindled a fire. The bright heat and crackle of it cheered Bily’s spirits and he went to some trouble to prepare a thick stew for their supper. He felt steadier once his belly was full and he began to think about the things he would need for the lancing of the Monster’s paw, knowing it could not be left much longer. His last thought before he slept was to hope the morning would dawn clear and bright, and that they would finally see the mountains.
But when Bily sat up the next morning, it was to find they were enveloped in a dense fog that allowed them to see no more than a few steps in any direction. There was no horizon to be seen, and the whole vast world had shrunk to the white mist on all sides. The billowing softness made Bily feel eerily as if the world was dissolving around them and he felt a sudden ache of longing for their cottage on the plain, where there were no shifty white dunes shimmering with sly mirages that tricked your eyes into seeing things that were not there, or secretive mists hiding everything from everything else. It seemed to him suddenly that they had left all that was clear and firm and certain when they had left the cottage and a little fear shuddered through him at the thought that it would be more and more like this the further West they travelled.