Pathfinder by Orson Scott Card
Umbo stared intently at Rigg’s face. “Are you insane?” asked Umbo. “It’s our local saint.”
“What’s a saint?” asked Rigg. “You swore by one before—the same one? This wandering one?”
“A holy man,” said Umbo impatiently. “A man some god has favored. Or at least some demon has been merciful to.”
Gods and demons Rigg had heard about, but Father had no patience with such ideas. “There are some gods and some demons whose stories are based on real things that happened to real men,” Father had taught him. “And some that are completely made up—to frighten children, or get them to obey, or to make people feel better when something goes terribly wrong in their lives.”
Now a new category had been added: saint.
“So this saint isn’t a god, he just has a friend who is.”
“Or a demon who favors him. Like a pet. They go out hunting or whatever. Ordinary people just stay away from the gods and demons as best they can. It’s the saints we talk to, since they’re so thick with the powerful ones. But you know this, Rigg. You went to Hemopheron’s lessons same as me.”
Rigg knew Hemopheron, the schoolteacher for the boys whose parents could afford the tuition. Rigg had gone with Umbo now and then, but Father had ridiculed him for it, pointing out that if Hemopheron knew anything, he wouldn’t be teaching in Fall Ford. “I’ll teach you everything you need to know,” Father had said. But he hadn’t, after all. He had held back some of the most important bits. In fact, Rigg wondered if Father had mostly taught him things he didn’t need.
“Come inside,” said Umbo. “We can stay here—it’s a sanctuary for travelers, all the shrines of the Wandering Saint are. The only curse on it comes if we desecrate the place.”
“Desecrate?” asked Rigg.
“Poo or pee,” said Umbo. “Inside it, I mean.”
They were standing there in nearly complete darkness, just a bit of starlight seeping in through the door. There were walls. There was a floor.
“Well,” said Rigg, “I’d better go back out before I lie down on this very hard stone floor to sleep. In fact, since it isn’t raining, I think I’ll sleep outside.”
“But . . .” Umbo began.
“You’ll be fine inside, if that’s where you want to be,” said Rigg. “And I’m used to sleeping outside.”
“You’re rejecting the hospitality of the saint?”
“On the contrary,” said Rigg. “I’m preserving the holiness. Of this place. Because I intend to poo and pee all night.”
Umbo stayed inside when Rigg came out and found a place to empty his bladder. He didn’t really need to do anything else, so he walked a quarter of the way around the shrine and found a place where, using his fingers, he could rake together a reasonably soft bed of soil and leaves.
But he couldn’t get to sleep because this was all too strange. He had never come to this place, but since they rarely traveled on the North Road that was no surprise. This business of saints and gods and demons—Rigg did not remember ever playing such games as Umbo described. And gods and demons were things that people invoked without actually seeming to believe much in them. I mean, when you curse “by Silbom’s left testicle” you can’t be terribly worried that the god might take offense and come and punish you—and that had always been the favorite oath of the blacksmith.
Yet Umbo seemed absolutely certain that he and Rigg had played these games, and that everyone—including Rigg—knew about saints. How could such a thing be? How could two people who had played together quite a lot as children have such completely different memories, but in just one area?
Rigg heard Umbo come out of the shrine. “Rigg?” he called out.
“I’m over here,” said Rigg. “You’re welcome to sleep outside near me—it’s a lot softer and it’s not a cold night.”
“No,” said Umbo. “Where did you pee and all?”
“You don’t have to use the same place.”
“I want to avoid the place,” said Umbo. “I don’t want to step in anything.”
“Oh—go away from the door to the left and you won’t be anywhere near my personal mud.”
Umbo gave a little hoot of laughter. “Personal mud.”
“That’s what . . .” but then Rigg didn’t finish the sentence. That’s what Father always called it. What would Umbo know—or care—about that?
Thinking about Father made Rigg sad all over again, and to keep himself from crying he shut his eyes and started working through some of the problems in topology that Father had been training him in. Visualizing a fractal landscape was always a surefire sleep inducer, Rigg had found—no matter how much you explored it, going in deeper or coming out to a wider view, there were always new forms to discover.
He woke up at the first light of dawn. He was a little stiff from the chill of the morning—it was cold, he could see his breath—but he had shaken out the kinks by the time he got back to his spot from the night before and added to the mud. Then he went across the clearing to the other side, where there was a burbling stream with clear water. He filled three smallish water bags—another habit he had learned from traveling with Father. “You never know when you might break a bone and have to go a long time before someone finds you.”
“You’ll find me, Father,” Rigg had replied, but Father would not find him now. And the water would be for two travelers, not one.
Umbo hadn’t stirred yet when Rigg got back to the shrine. Rigg got his little pack open and pulled out the food Nox had given him. Having accepted Umbo as a traveling companion, by the custom of the road the food belonged half to him. From his own half, then, Rigg ate only a little. He didn’t want to have to stop and hunt very much, this close to Fall Ford; he’d let the food linger as long as he could before he worked the setting of traps into the nightly routine.
It was full light before Umbo came out of the shrine, groaning and walking like a cripple.
“Stone floor,” said Rigg. “It’ll do it every time.”
“But it has walls,” said Umbo.
“And a door that doesn’t close.”
“It doesn’t have to close,” said Umbo, “with the saint’s protection.”
“So what happens if robbers come and decide to kill everyone and take what they have? This withering saint appears and stands in the doorway and withers at them?”
“Wandering Saint,” said Umbo, looking pained.
“I know, I was joking,” said Rigg.
“You shouldn’t joke about sacred things,” said Umbo.
“What’s happened to you?” asked Rigg.
“I need to make mud—is that what you call it? That’s what’s about to happen to me.”
Umbo went off for a while and then came back and said, “You have any food?”
“You didn’t bring any?” asked Rigg, assuming that he hadn’t.
“Just this sausage,” said Umbo. “My sister hid it in my hat—she rushed after me and gave me my hat. I think Father hit her for the hat—for giving me anything at all. But he might have killed her for the sausage. Well, not killed, but you know.”
“Share the sausage. Here’s what Nox gave me. Halves on everything.”
“I know the traveler rules,” said Umbo.
“This is your half.”
Umbo looked from half to half.
“It was even when I divided it,” said Rigg.
“It’s still even as far as I can tell. Haven’t you eaten?”
“I’ve eaten as much as I want. I want this food to last.”
“What good is it to make the food last? So the animals who find your starved corpse will have something delicious to eat and leave your flesh alone?”
“I had what I need,” said Rigg. “We often go for a few days on short rations, just for practice. You get so you kind of like the feeling of being hungry.”
“That is the sickest thing I’ve ever heard,” said Umbo.
And then, once again, Umbo was caught up in sobs. Only for a moment—jus
“What am I? A stump?” asked Rigg.
“I meant somebody who wouldn’t understand. Somebody who wasn’t there.”
By that system of thought, Umbo could mourn for his brother all he wanted, but Rigg had better not shed tears for Father, since nobody else was there. But Rigg wasn’t in the mood for a quarrel. They had a long way to walk today, and Umbo wasn’t used to walking, and the last thing they needed was to be snippy with each other from the start.
“Eat,” said Rigg. “Or smear the food into your hair, or whatever you intend to do, but let’s get it done. The sun’s up now, so we’ve already lost a half hour of traveling at least, and there’ll be other people on the road before long.”
“Oh, are we avoiding them?” asked Umbo.
“I am,” said Rigg. “If they come from Fall Ford, anyway. Looking for me. Or you, for that matter. And strangers coming the other way—what are they going to think of boys traveling without adults with them? We have to be ready to dodge into the woods whenever anybody’s coming. I don’t want a lot of conversations with strangers out here.”
“A lot of travelers come through Fall Ford,” said Umbo. “They never harm anybody.”
“In Fall Ford they’re outnumbered. They might act very differently when they outnumber us.”
“What are you scared of?”
“Well, let’s see. Death first—that’s a big one. And pain. And having somebody take away what pathetic few things I own.” He didn’t see any reason for Umbo to know about the jewels and the letter of credit. Travelers’ law of sharing didn’t extend to money or trade goods or other valuables.
“I’ve never even thought about that until . . .”
Rigg thought Umbo was going to cry again, but he didn’t after all.
“Well, Umbo,” said Rigg, “you’ve spent your whole life in a village. It’s a lot safer there, unless somebody accuses you of murder and they work up a mob to come and kill you.”
Umbo looked away—ashamed? angry?—so Rigg dropped the subject. Not a good topic for humor yet. Father would have understood that joking about the worst things is how you get them tame and under control.
“Look,” said Rigg. “I’ve spent my life traveling. But in the wild, not on populated roads. Father and I always stepped out of the road when we were carrying pelts on our backs, because we don’t have the agility to fight or even to run away, unless we drop the pelts, and then they can be stolen. So it’s a habit, for safety. And I figured I don’t know what kind of danger we’re going to face on this road, but it can’t hurt to stick to the same habit. If you want to travel with me, you’re going to need to comply with that. All right?”
“You can hide, I’ll stay in the road.”
“That’s what I said,” Rigg said, letting himself sound a little annoyed. “If you stay in the road, and something bad happens to you, then if we’re traveling together I’m honor bound to defend you. And the whole point of my leaving the road is to avoid having to defend anybody. So if you don’t want to leave the road whenever I say, and hide as long as I say, then we aren’t traveling together. We’re each on our own. Is that how you want it?”
“Sure, no,” said Umbo quickly. “I wasn’t trying to cause trouble. I just ache all over and the idea of constantly getting off the road and hiding in the woods just doesn’t sound very good to me. Besides, you move like a senoose, so quiet you could surprise a snake. I crash around like a drunken cow.”
“I’ve never seen a drunken cow,” said Rigg.
“Then you’ve never laughed,” said Umbo. “Of course, if somebody catches you giving ale to a cow, they’ll turn you into shoe leather.”
“So you’re done eating? We can go?”
“Yes,” said Umbo. He picked up his few possessions and headed, not down the path toward the road, but straight toward the shrine entrance.
“Where are you going?”
“We’re not going to set out on a journey without paying our respects to the Wandering Saint, are we? I thought that’s why you picked this place to stay last night—for the sanctuary and for the blessing.”
It wasn’t worth arguing. Rigg followed Umbo inside.
A smoke hole had been left in the middle of the roof, and it allowed in enough daylight that now Rigg could see that the walls were painted. Not just decorations, like the ones the women wove into their cloth in Fall Ford, but actual figures of people. He couldn’t see all that clearly, but well enough to see that the same man—or at least a manlike thing with the same clothing—kept showing up in every wall section.
“It’s the life of the Wandering Saint,” said Umbo. “Since you seem never to have seen it or even heard of him before.”
Rigg walked around, beholding the legends of the W.S., for Rigg was already thinking of him that way. He always made initials and acronyms out of phrases that he thought were getting too repetitive. “Personal mud” had long since become “p.m.” in his mind.
Here the W.S. brought two lost children back to their joyful mother. On the next panel, he fought off a bear that was about to devour a poor family’s milk ewe. All sorts of brave and good deeds.
When we were growing up, thought Rigg, we called these Hero Stories and that’s what we acted out when we played. Kyokay always wanted to be the bear or the ruffian or the enemy troop, he never wanted to be the one that got rescued, even though he was the smallest. The gods didn’t even come into it.
But he didn’t want to talk about it with Umbo. It was too disturbing that their memories had grown so different.
“Come on,” said Rigg. “What is it we have to do before we can leave?”
“Just this,” said Umbo. “Look at the stories and remember the Wandering Saint.”
“Then I’m done.”
“Except that you started with the second panel,” said Umbo. “You missed the whole beginning, which is when the Wandering Saint first encountered his demon and gained the power to make it disappear. That’s how he’s able to do all these good things—he can command demons to disappear.”
“Can?” asked Rigg. “He’s still alive?”
Umbo laughed. “No, I don’t think so. I mean, not in the body. Did you know that there are people who said your dad was the Wandering Saint?”
“No,” said Rigg. “Nox said they called him ‘Wandering Man,’ sometimes, and she called him ‘Good Teacher,’ but nobody ever said ‘Saint.’”
“They used to whisper it all the time,” said Umbo. “Among other things. I guess they never talked like that in front of you.”
“Nobody ever mentioned the . . .” He let his voice trail off before he could say something annoying, like “Nobody ever mentioned the stupid Whimpering Saint at all.”
Instead of picking a quarrel, Rigg dutifully went to the first panel and saw at once that it was a depiction of the top of Stashi Falls, seen as if you were hovering in the air about three rods away from the face of the falls. A man was dangling from a single stone right at the lip of the falls, water spraying down (or so it seemed the painter wished to suggest) on both sides of him, while a fierce demon squatted on the stone and pried up on his fingers.
Then, still on the same picture of the falls but a little over to the right, there was the same man (by the costume anyway) dangling from the same rock, only instead of a demon there was a wad of something nondescript and the man now had two hands on the stone and was raising himself up.
“That was the miracle, see?” said Umbo. “You’ve really never heard of him? If you’re just lying to make me tell this story I’ll fart in your food, I swear it.”
“What miracle?”
“The demon knocked him off the falls and the Wandering Saint barely caught himself by one hand on a dry rock. Then the demon smashed at his h
Rigg didn’t really care about the fingers. Couldn’t Umbo see that this was a picture of what happened yesterday on the cliff? But of course he couldn’t. Umbo had seen only his brother Kyokay. He had never seen the man that Rigg fought with to try to get through him so he could reach Kyokay’s hand to save him.
This is the man I fought. He was real—but he was from the past, and stayed in the past. He didn’t die after I lost sight of him. When time sped back up and I stopped prying his fingers, he must have thought a miracle happened. And when he climbed up onto the stone—he must have been so strong!—there would have been no sign of me.
Except there was something on the rock. “What’s this?” asked Rigg.
“Oh, that’s not supposed to be there. That’s really in the second story, but they just put it there to remind us of it so they could use the other panels for other tales. It’s a fur.”
“A fur?”
“When the Wandering Saint came down the Upsheer, he was cold and frightened, and he went to the great pool in the river where the cascade makes a mist, and caught among stones he found a fur, completely dressed out and ready for him to use it. It was from the demon, of course—the demon now recognized the Wandering Saint as a man of power, and so he gave him the fur as a tribute.”
I dropped my furs in this time, not in that man’s time, thought Rigg. But . . . maybe a fur got hung up on rocks for a brief while at the top of the falls, and maybe, just as time slowed down so I got shifted into the past where this man was, the last of my furs got swept right past the stone and . . .
He wanted to blurt out the truth to Umbo, but felt the long habit of silence about his abilities hold back his words. Father had forbidden him to tell anyone.
But Father had told Nox, hadn’t he? Because he trusted her.
Well, I trust Umbo. Or at least I want to. And if I’m traveling with him, how can I hide what I do with paths? Do I have to pretend that I don’t know where roads lead, or when someone is approaching, or where someone has laid an ambush? Maybe Umbo isn’t trustworthy. But if he is, this journey will be a lot better for not having to hide what I can do.