Robert Silverberg - Nightwings

Leaving our new masters to their amusement, I walked off, toward the outskirts of the city. The bleakness of eternal winter crept into my soul. I wondered: did I feel sorrow that Roum had fallen? Or did I mourn the loss of Avluela? Or was it only that I now had missed three successive Watchings, and like an addict I was experiencing the pangs of withdrawal?

It was all of these that pained me, I decided. But mostly the last.

No one was abroad in the city as I made for the gates. Fear of the new masters kept the Roumish in hiding, I supposed. From time to time one of the alien vehicles hummed past, but I was unmolested. I came to the city’s western gate late in the afternoon. It was open, revealing to me a gently rising hill on whose breast rose trees with dark green crowns. I passed through and saw, a short distance beyond the gate, the figure of a Pilgrim who was shuffling slowly away irom the city.

I overtook him easily.

His faltering, uncertain walk seemed strange to me, for not even his thick brown robes could hide the strength and youth of his body; he stood erect, his shoulders square and his back straight, and yet he walked with the hesitating, trembling step of an old man. When I drew abreast of him and peered under his hood I understood, for affixed to the bronze mask all Pilgrims wear was a reverberator, such as is used by blind men to warn them of obstacles and hazards. He became aware of me and said, “I am a sightless Pilgrim. I pray you do not molest me.”

It was not a Pilgrim’s voice. It was a strong and harsh and imperious voice.

I replied, “I molest no one. I am a Watcher who has lost his occupation this night past.”

“Many occupations were lost this night past, Watcher.”

“Surely not a Pilgrim’s.”

“No,” he said. “Not a Pilgrim’s.”

“Where are you bound?”

“Away from Roum.”

“No particular destination?”

“No,” the Pilgrim said. “None. I will wander.” “Perhaps we should wander together,” I said, for it is accounted good luck to travel with a Pilgrim, and, shorn of my Flier and my Changeling, I would otherwise have traveled alone. “My destination is Perris. Will you come?”

“There as well as anywhere else,” he said bitterly. “Yes. We will go to Perris together. But what business does a Watcher have there?”

“A Watcher has no business anywhere. I go to Perris to offer myself in service to the Rememberers.”

“Ah,” he said. “I was of that guild too, but it was only honorary.”

“With Earth fallen, I wish to learn more of Earth in its pride.”

“Is all Earth fallen, then, and not only Roum?”

“I think it is so,” I said.

“Ah,” replied the Pilgrim. “Ah!”

He fell silent and we went onward. I gave him my arm, and now he shuffled no longer, but moved with a young man’s brisk stride. From time to time he uttered what might have been a sigh or a smothered sob. When I asked him details of his Pilgrimage, he answered obliquely or not at all. When we were an hour’s journey outside Roum, and already amid forests, he said suddenly, “This mask gives me pain. Will you help me adjust it?”

To my amazement he began to remove it. I gasped, for it is forbidden for a Pilgrim to reveal his face. Had he forgotten that I was not sightless too?

As the mask came away he said, “You will not welcome this sight.”

The bronze grillwork slipped down from his forehead, and I saw first eyes that had been newly blinded, gaping holes where no surgeon’s knife, but possibly thrusting fingers, had penetrated, and then the sharp regal nose, and finally the quirked, taut lips of the Prince of Roum.

“Your Majesty!” I cried.

Trails of dried blood ran down his cheeks. About the raw sockets themselves were smears of ointment. He felt little pain, I suppose, for he had killed it with those green smears, but the pain that burst through me was real and potent.

“Majesty no longer,” he said. “Help me with the mask!” His hands trembled as he held it forth, “These flanges must be widened. They press cruelly at my cheeks. Here—here—”

Quickly I made the adjustments, so that I would not have to see his ruined face for long.

He replaced the mask. “I am a Pilgrim now,” he said quietly. “Roum is without its Prince. Betray me if you wish, Watcher; otherwise help me to Perris; and if ever I regain my power you will be well rewarded.”

“I am no betrayer,” I told him.

In silence we continued. I had no way of making small talk with such a man. It would be a somber journey for us to Perris; but I was committed now to be his guide. I thought of Gormon and how well he had kept his vows. I thought too of Avluela, and a hundred times the words leaped to my tongue to ask the fallen Prince how his consort the Flier had fared in the night of defeat, and I did not ask.

Twilight gathered, but the sun still gleamed golden-red before us in the west. And suddenly I halted and made a hoarse sound of surprise deep in my throat, as a shadow passed overhead.

High above me Avluela soared. Her skin was stained by the colors of the sunset, and her wings were spread to their fullest, radiant with every hue of the spectrum. She was already at least the height of a hundred men above the ground, and still climbing, and to her I must have been only a speck among the trees.

“What is it?” the Prince asked. “What do you see?”

“Nothing.”

“Tell me what you see!”

I could not deceive him. “I see a Flier, your Majesty. A slim girl far aloft.”

“Then the night must have come.”

“No,” I said. “The sun is still above the horizon.”

“How can that be? She can have only nightwings. The sun would hurl her to the ground.”

I hesitated. I could not bring myself to explain how it was that Avluela flew by day, though she had only nightwings. I could not tell the Prince of Roum that beside her, wingless, flew the invader Gormon, effortlessly moving through the air, his arm about her thin shoulders, steadying her, supporting her, helping her resist the pressure of the solar wind. I could not tell him that his nemesis flew with the last of his consorts above his head.

“Well?” he demanded. “How does she fly by day?”

“I do not know,” I said. “It is a mystery to me. There are many things nowadays I can no longer understand.”

The Prince appeared to accept that. “Yes, Watcher. Many things none of us can understand.”

He fell once more into silence. I yearned to call out to Avluela, but I knew she could not and would not hear me, and so I walked on toward the sunset, toward Perris, leading the blind Prince. And over us Avluela and Gormon sped onward, limned sharply against the day’s last glow, until they climbed so high they were lost to my sight.

To Journey with a fallen Prince is no easy thing. His eyes were gone, but not his pride; blinding had taught him no humility. He wore the robes and mask of a Pilgrim, but there was no piety in his soul and little grace. Behind his mask he still knew himself to be the Prince of Roum.

I was all his court now, as we walked the road to Perris in early springtime. I led him along the right roads; I amused him at his command with stories of my wanderings; I nursed him through moods of sulky bitterness. In return I got very little except the assurance that I would eat regularly. No one denies food to a Pilgrim, and in each village on our way we stopped in inns, where he was fed and I, as his companion, also was given meals. Once, early in our travels, he erred and haughtily told an innkeeper, “See that you feed my servant as well!” The blinded Prince could not see that look of shocked disbelief—for what would a Pilgrim be doing with a servant?—but I smiled at the innkeeper, and winked, and tapped my forehead, and the man understood and served us both without discussion. Afterward I explained the error to the Prince, and thereafter he spoke of me as his companion. Yet I knew that to him I was nothing but a servant.