Then he saw paw prints in the dark earth, running up to the edge of the stream.
They were small and very like digger prints and there were a good number of them going into the water, but oddly, none coming out. It was as if the diggers – if that was what they were – had entered the water here and then walked downstream to emerge elsewhere. That made no sense unless they had a burrow in the sheer rock on the other side of the stream, but he could not see any sign of a hole or opening.
He continued along the stream but he did not find the place where the prints emerged. He returned to the tracks and followed them away from the canal, but after some time he grew anxious about how far he had come and turned back. Noticing the sun has passed its zenith, he followed the stream back to the pass. He was convinced the diggers had entered the water and walked downstream, but he could not think why they would do such a strange thing.
Then it struck him that walking in the water would hide tracks or scent trails and his skin rose into goosebumps. Because a digger would only hide its tracks if it feared being followed. The tracks told him the creatures were too big to fear any ordinary bird, so there must be something more dangerous inhabiting the pass, or living nearby.
He began walking faster, and by the time he reached the mouth of the pass he was almost running. Seeing Bily unharmed and unperturbed, he slowed and heaved a sigh of relief. Bily beckoned and Zluty prepared himself to be peppered with questions. But Bily only said grimly, ‘I have prepared fresh bandages and I boiled a needle but you must wash your hands in hot water before you start.’
That was when Zluty realised he was going to have to lance the Monster’s paw, because of course Bily could not manage it with his hurt hand. ‘What if it wakes and thinks I am attacking it?’ he asked, trying not to sound as unnerved as he felt.
‘I have mashed lorassum leaf since we cannot rely upon the Monster to chew the leaf or to spit out after,’ Bily said calmly. ‘Once it swallows the juice, it will not move or wake for hours.’
Zluty’s heart had begun to race and skip, but he forced himself to take deep breaths as he washed his hands in the near scalding water Bily prepared. Then Bily dribbled the pungent lorassum syrup into the Monster’s mouth and rubbed its throat until it swallowed. After a short time, he pinched the Monster hard. When it did not move a muscle, he nodded to Zluty, who managed to give a nod that he hoped was steadfast if not enthusiastic.
‘I will use cactus salve to numb the pain afterwards, but I do wish we had more lorassum leaf.’ Bily caught hold of the Monster’s paw and held it out to Zluty, his expression grave and expectant as he pointed to a small dark place in the middle of a puffy red swelling.
Swallowing hard, Zluty took up the needle in a hand that was not quite steady and, drawing a deep breath, he drove it into the Monster’s paw.
Afterwards, it was Bily who smoothed the poultice that would draw out the last of the infection because Zluty had to sit down. The Monster had not stirred a muscle when Bily had him press and massage the wound to expel the blood and infected matter from it. The memory made Zluty feel ill and he looked around, trying to find something to distract him.
He noticed Redwing perched on the side of the wagon preening herself. She had returned just after they had lanced the paw and Zluty knew he ought to find out if she had seen any sign of diggers in her flight North, but he felt too strange and shivery to trust himself to stand yet, let alone to speak.
He was shaken by his reactions. Healing had always been Bily’s concern, and it had never occurred to Zluty that it might not always be a gentle pursuit; that it could sometimes demand great strength of will and courage.
Thinking again of the Monster’s accusation that he underestimated his brother, Zluty took out his reed pipe and played a soft tune that was partly about the strange and terrible redness of the Monster’s blood, and partly about Bily’s courage, which was so modest that you did not notice the strength of it.
‘It is not easy to hurt something, even when it is for its own sake,’ Bily said, patting Zluty’s shoulder comfortingly. Then he sighed. ‘The Monster will be in great pain and I dare not use the last of the lorassum leaves for we may have need of them before our journey ends. If I had only harvested the leaves in the cottage garden before the arosh came.’
‘No use lamenting what you did not do when you did not know it mattered,’ Zluty said, pulling himself together. ‘We will stay here until tomorrow night to let the Monster recover a bit.’
But Bily shook his head. ‘We must leave now while the lorassum keeps the Monster sleeping soundly.’ He cast a mistrustful look at the mountains soaring up either side of the pass, their peaks lost in mist and shadow, and Zluty guessed he was worrying about blizzards.
Without waiting for Zluty to respond, he went to Redwing with a bowl of seeds and petted her as she pecked at them.
Bily was ashamed of his fear, Zluty thought, but fear was no more than a warning your senses offered. He forced himself to stand, ignoring the way his head spun, and began to pack things away. ‘We will pull the wagon out of the pass and around to the North,’ he said, deciding not to mention the digger footprints until they were out of the pass.
When Bily made no response, Zluty turned and saw with a stab of alarm that his brother’s eyes were fixed on something behind him. Zluty whirled, catching up his staff to defend them. But instead of finding himself menaced by a pack of blizzards, he saw a group of very small diggers with mist-grey fur, great black plumed tails and dark eyes.
‘Ra!’ said one of them softly.
Zluty echoed the greeting faintly, and the little creature rose up onto its back paws to deliver a long chittering speech composed partly of gesture and partly of soft guttural grunts. Zluty was too rattled to understand and looked to Bily for an explanation.
‘It says they came because they smelled a strangeness,’ Bily said without taking his eyes from the diggers. ‘I think they mean the Monster, for they ask to see it. Him, they say.’
He knelt in front of the digger that had spoken, held out his hand and made a few clicking sounds and some soft grunts.
Solemnly the digger laid its small paw in his hand, ears twitching. Bily’s face took on the serene, trance-like expression he always got when communing with any small creature. Zluty thought of it as his making-his-mind-quiet expression.
At length, Bily rose and turned to Zluty.
‘I told them the pass is blocked,’ he said. ‘I asked if there is another way to get to the other side of the mountains rather than going all the way around them. It says they can show us a quick way, but first they want to see the Monster. It says they know its smell but they have never seen its kind.’
‘How can they know the smell of a thing they have never seen?’ Zluty asked.
Bily shrugged. ‘It said the smell is in the clan memory songs.’
Zluty frowned. He knew diggers were able to pass on scents, though he had never been sure if they passed them on by copying them, or by describing them so well that other diggers could recognise the description. But to hear that they passed them on by song! He was sure that none of the diggers on their plain back home made songs, however much they liked listening to his pipe.
Bily led the diggers to the wagon, where they gazed for a long time at the sleeping Monster, and then with rapt wonder at Redwing. Zluty finished packing before extinguishing the fire. Then he took up both tow ropes, insisting it was easy to pull the wagon by himself along flat ground. Quietly, he told Bily, ‘Walk with the diggers and see what you can learn about this quick way through the mountains.’
Soon they were moving North along the stream in the cold shadow cast by the mountains. As twilight fell, it became harder and harder to see. A thick mist lay over the water so that it was as if it were a stream of mist running along the foot of the mountains. The diggers progressed slowly enough that Zluty had no trouble keeping up. As it got darker, he lit the wick of the little lantern so that he could better watch for cracks in
the ground.
The lantern had got very battered in the stone storm and leaked oil, but he had kept it because it reminded him of home. Yet the light it gave was fitful and shifty, and there were more and more cracks to be avoided.
Finally, Zluty decided they had better stop until the blue moon rose. It was too misty for them to see it, but hopefully it would offer light enough to see a few steps ahead of their noses.
The diggers watched wide-eyed while Bily set about preparing mushrooms and tubers for supper. Zluty dug a small pit and kindled a fire. The diggers back home had been afraid of fire, and Zluty half expected these diggers to react in the same way, but when he began to build up a rough rim of small stones around the fire pit they reacted, darting away and returning with small stones and pebbles. These they fitted in place so cleverly that, when they had finished, the little firewall was as smooth as if all of the stones had been naturally joined together.
Bily marvelled at the beauty of the pattern of colour in the stones, saying it could not possibly have come about by chance. But Zluty was more interested in what had made the diggers want to help him build the firewall than in their ability to make it pretty. It was not that the diggers by the cottage had been unwilling to help, only that they did not do so unless they were asked and the task carefully explained.
Oddly, when Bily began to fry the tuber and mushrooms over the flames, the diggers were visibly startled. This meant that while they knew what fire was, they obviously did not use it for cooking. So where had they seen fire often enough that they would not react to the sight of it? On the plain, they might have seen a wildfire kindled by lightning, but not in this bare, damp, misty region.
Bily offered the diggers a bowl full of the rich savoury food, and they examined it with interest. They sniffed it for a long time and nibbled politely, dubiously, then with increasing pleasure. Bily dished two more bowls up, and as he and Zluty ate their share, he explained that the diggers claimed the Monster’s smell had sometimes drifted down from the mountains.
‘His smell, they say, though the Monster never asked them to name it as male,’ Bily said.
Zluty frowned. ‘You must have got it wrong. The Monster never said anything about being up in the mountains.’
‘I might have muddled it,’ Bily admitted. ‘The things these diggers say are a lot more complicated than anything the ones near the cottage ever said. And these are scent memories the diggers are talking about so probably they don’t even mean our Monster. Maybe there was a time when the Monster’s people went to the mountains.’
It was possible, Zluty supposed. He finally told Bily about the footprints he had seen going into the water and bid him question the diggers about it. They had travelled alongside the water without evident fear. But Zluty thought this might simply be because they felt safe with them.
After a long conversation with the diggers, Bily told him, ‘They say it is quicker to travel along the stream. I asked about the blizzards, too. They say they only come down into the pass in Winter, and they never go outside it save during the coldest winters.’
‘That is a relief,’ Zluty said, wondering why Bily did not look relieved.
‘There is something ahead that they are worried about,’ he went on. ‘They say we need to get past whatever it is before dawn because that is when the Monks will come.’
‘Monks?’
‘Some sort of creatures that live up on the Clouded Mountains. The diggers call them Monks, but the gestures they use mean those-that-fix.’
‘What do they fix?’ Zluty asked, wondering what sort of animal would willingly share territory with the dangerous-sounding blizzards, let alone other even more dangerous creatures.
‘Monks fix what the Makers want fixed, they say,’ Bily answered.
‘The Makers again,’ Zluty muttered. ‘Maybe these Makers left the Monster’s people to live in the mountains with the Monks.’
Bily looked doubtful. ‘The diggers also say the Monks’ heads are made of metal. They say if Monks see us, they will capture us and turn our heads into metal.’
Zluty stared. ‘But how can heads be metal?’
‘I don’t know,’ Bily said.
‘Did they talk of how we are to get through the mountains?’ Zluty asked.
Bily shook his head. ‘One of the diggers said to the others that there was no need for us to worry since the Monster won’t let the Monks do anything to us. But another digger said the Monster is broken and will not be able to help us.’
Zluty did not know what to say to this, so he said nothing.
When the Moon’s Dream finally rose, the misty air glowed a dim violet that helped them see the ground just ahead. It was not really enough, but Zluty decided they had better go on as the diggers appeared to be anxious about stopping for so long. When they set off, the little creatures rushed hither and thither scolding him to make haste and getting in the way more often than not.
Finally, Bily asked them if they’d like to ride in the wagon. To Zluty’s surprise, they accepted his offer. Once lifted up, they clustered together as far as possible from the sleeping Monster, whom they seemed to regard both with wariness and reverence. A few of the diggers crept to where Redwing was perched on the awning frame, and gazed up at her in wonder.
Zluty supposed they had never seen a bird like her before.
They stopped only once more to drink some water and when they continued Zluty noticed a digger had now mounted the frame and was precariously perched alongside Redwing, talking animatedly. At first he thought she was merely listening to its noise, then Bily said that it was telling her of a flyway through which she could glide swiftly and safely to the other side of the mountains.
‘It said she cannot go the way we go, or the blizzards will kill her. Redwing asked if we could not go through the flyway, but the digger said that way can only be taken by winged things.’
Zluty said firmly, ‘We must not part. She can ride on the edge of the wagon as she is doing now.’
A shaft of bright moonlight pierced the mist and Zluty saw with astonishment that what he had taken for broken bits of stone and boulders on the ground beside the stream were metal objects. He had never seen so many in one area. Nor could the objects possibly have fallen in such careful, perfect order. They had to have been placed like that.
‘I think this is what the diggers were telling me about,’ Bily said. ‘This is where the Monks come at dawn. The diggers say they bring those metal objects down when they come.’
Zluty glanced up uneasily, but saw only a few dark patches of the mountain face through the mist. The diggers were chittering and hissing to one another. Zluty wondered suddenly if when they had talked of Monks having metal heads, they had simply been trying to say that they carried metal objects down from the mountains on their heads. He was about to suggest this to Bily when the Monster gave a long, gutteral yowl, twisting in its sleep and flexing its terrible long claws.
‘The lorassum is beginning to wear off,’ Bily said.
The diggers on the wagon became agitated and, thinking the Monster had frightened them, Zluty lifted them down. But when he made to continue pulling the wagon North, they blocked his way, chattering and gesturing frantically at him.
‘Why do they want us to stop here if this is where the Monks will come?’ Zluty asked Bily.
‘They don’t want us to stop,’ Bily said. ‘They want us to turn East.’
‘East!’ Zluty said. ‘But they were going to show us how to cross the mountains!’
‘They say we must come back at night when it is safe,’ Bily explained. ‘It seems these Monks do not come out once the sun sets.’ He hesitated and then said, ‘Zluty, I think we should do what they want. I do not like the sound of these Monks.’
Zluty did not want to go East, but he had heard the quaver in Bily’s voice and the diggers were now plucking urgently at the ends of the tow ropes. ‘All right,’ he agreed. At least they would be safe in the digger settlement and the Monster cou
ld have some proper rest. They might also be able to barter for supplies. His mouth watered at the thought of warm digger milk, but even more than the rich frothy milk, he thirsted to know more about the mysterious Monks.
Bily relayed their decision to the diggers who stroked his fur and crooned with approval. Then they turned and began racing away East, stopping only to beckon beseechingly.
They went East for over an hour, crossing terrain so monotonously barren that Zluty began to feel they were not moving at all, only walking in the same place with the violet mist billowing about them. The mist, lit by the Moon’s Dream, was beautiful, or would have been if the clammy dampness had not made Zluty’s skin creep and his fur fluff. At last the mist began to thin and the light to strengthen causing stones and boulders to cast faint blue shadows. The blue moon was not far from setting. They had reached the outer edge of the veils of mist that enveloped the mountains.
When Zluty turned to look, the mountains had vanished behind an impenetrable wall of mist.
In the distance Zluty saw the distinctive humped shapes of the earthern mounds that hid the entrances to the diggers’ underground burrows. The diggers streamed away towards the settlement and Zluty adjusted his course to follow them, noticing the humps were a good bit higher than those of the digger settlements back home. There were even openings in them like windows. Nor were they arranged haphazardly, but in a neat circle, all doorways facing onto a central space. Here, Zluty was astonished to see, a number of small camp fires burned!