Роджер Желязны - Warriors of Blood and Dream

When we got to shore, I discovered my cigar had gone out. Jan was still chomping on his, blowing clouds of blue smoke.

"We're not done yet," he grinned, "I have another test for you."

He handed me his canteen and I took a long swallow of water.

"Now take a mouthful of water, and hold it in your mouth without swallowing it," he ordered.

I nodded. If the last "test" made no sense, this one— whatever it was—already seemed idiotic.

Then, taking a swig himself, he started up Firefly Hill along the goat trail that went up the back of the mountain. We were barefoot. I was tired, and annoyed. But I followed him, begrudgingly, wondering why I was unable to say no to these antics. Sokol was one thing, but these lunatic diversions were quite another.

He took the hill at a torturous pace. I could handle it—on a normal day. But not after chewing on a salt-rimed cigar, and swimming two miles out in the Horns.

Now, there was that maddening mouthful of water sloshing around, tempting and teasing and begging me to swallow it. My throat was burning, my back was aching, and now my bare feet were being punished by an assortment of rocks, thorns, and slippery goat shit that I kept sliding on, and which caused me to bang my knee against the cliff side of the mountain.

As we neared the top of Firefly Hill, I was hit with intestinal rebellion—and vomited all over my feet

I was cursing Jan Volta, hating myself for throwing up that mouthful of water, and, of course, for failing my "test."

But he was unmindful of my suffering. I saw him peeing off the edge of the mountain. Then he walked back to where I was sitting with my head between my knees, feeling sorry for myself.

"May I have a look at the bottoms of your feet?" he inquired.

Nodding, I lifted them up. My feet were bloody.

On the way down the mountain, he explained to me that it wasn't my feet which needed toughening, but rather my mind.

"Your eyes," he said roughly, "lack sight."

"What do my eyes have to do with my feet?" I asked crossly.

"You must see your goal. You must keep your eye on it while you are running."

"What are you talking about? I did that!"

"If you had—and I doubt that you did—you would've seen something."

"What?" I challenged.

"Did you see the way I was running?"

"Naturally, you were in front of me the whole way."

"Have a look," he said, and he lifted up one of his bare feet.

There were no cuts, no broken blisters. His feet looked fine.

"So—" I said petulantly, "what does that prove?"

"It proves that if you'd been seeing properly, you would've noticed that I was running, not to win, but merely to run. The mountain came to me, just like the swells down at the Horns. I let them come, they're bigger than I am. I just let them. But you attack the water the same way you attack the mountain—with a vengeance. That, my friend, must go. Don't you understand? This is all a shadow play, it means nothing. But someday it will mean something, and then, I hope you will be able to see well with your eyes."

The indignity of the run and the pain in my feet made me angry at him. I felt like the kid who has been betrayed by his scoutmaster.

"I ran lightly," I growled.

He guffawed. "If you'd run lightly, letting your feet fall flat, you wouldn't be suffering right now. I saw what you did. You ran with your feet arched like a deer. You attacked the mountain, when you should've floated a couple inches over it."

Though I was furious with him, I knew that he was right. The fact was, I had a hard time accepting that a seventy-five-year-old man could beat me at my own game. I'd gone at it wrong. My poor feet had hammered up that mountain with, yes, a vengeance.

Suddenly, I sat down and began to howl with laughter.

Jan stood by, not saying anything.

My laughter soon exhausted itself and turned into tears.

After a while, I got up and he said, "A stream stays alive by moving, but a man stays alive by thinking."

The next day, while we were sitting on the lawn in front of the Casa Maria, Jan saw a boy trying to catch a lizard with a palm noose.

"I bet I can catch that lizard without the noose," Jan chuckled.

But the boy said, "No, mon, de noose is what kotch 'im."

Jan stepped up to the pimiento tree where the big green iguana had taken refuge.

The boy said sourly, "You nah go kotch 'im like dat, mon. You haffa use de noose fe kotch dat lizard."

Jan walked boldly up to the lizard and stared into its golden eye. Neither one of them moved. The sun was hot, sweat rolled down Jan's neck, yet he remained as inert as the lizard. Finally, the lizard began to crawl up the tree. Then, like a striking snake, Jan's hand shot out and seized the lizard by the throat. Laughing, he handed it over to the boy, who asked how he had done it.

"Green lizard too fast fe kotch wid de hand," the boy said, holding up his prize, in amazement.

"No," Jan said, "the hand is always quicker than the eye. But with creatures quicker than the hand, you allow them to think that you're not there anymore. Then, when their attention is elsewhere, you take them. That is how I caught the lizard."

I asked him, later, if he had learned that trick from anyone.

He explained that he'd picked it up from his first sokol teacher, a master by the name of Mr. Hoyer.

"We were in the Carpathian Mountains," he said, "and we had caught a small female falcon. My teacher, Mr. Hoyer, told me to sit with the bird, which was tethered to a post in the dirt floor of the barn where we were going to pass the night. 'Whatever you do, don't look away from that falcon's eye,' Mr. Hoyer told me.

"Unfortunately, after several hours of staring mindlessly into the falcon's eye, I got drowsy and fell asleep. When I awoke, Mr. Hoyer was angry with me. 'You have ruined her,' he said, 'now I must start her training all over again.' Then he sat in front of the bird and readied himself for the staring match. Soon the bird and the man were one; they had locked eyes.

"At first, I believed that it was only their eyes which were connected. Then I understood the deeper truth. The two of them were joined—not eye to eye, as I'd supposed—but soul to soul. It was fascinating to watch two creatures of this earth, so different, and yet, because of this strange union, one and the same.

"In the end, somewhere near dawn, the bird finally grew weary. Once, just once, she closed her fiery eye. And Mr. Hoyer's gloved hand folded over the bird's beaked head. She made no move to resist—the stunned falcon was won, her soul now belonged to Mr. Hoyer. Thus do we pass the spirit of that bird, man to man, through the art of sokol."

One week later, we journeyed to the Blue Mountains to climb the cliff known as Jacob's Ladder. Jan said it would be a final test for me. The climb, perhaps because of the condition I was in, was not very strenuous; that is, until we came to the ladder itself.

What lay before us, then, was a promontory of sunbaked clay. Handholds had been carved into it for perhaps twenty yards, then the vertical incline leveled, so that the climber was again on safe ground. The problem the ladder posed was that of a maze. The bright sun played on the faceted footholds, blinding the climber. And the slick clay looked like black porcelain. One lost grip, and the climb would be over.

"Remember," Jan warned, "do not look down. Keep your eye trained on the falcon's eye."

I nodded, then began the ascent.

For better than halfway up, I kept my mind empty, my eye on the clefts of black burning clay. Jan was behind me, placing his hands where I removed my feet. There was no room, no time, for error. We had to climb regularly, breathing in unison, moving steadily upward.

Then, for a fraction of a second, my eye faltered. I saw the crack between my chest and the clay wall. In that crack lay the most beautiful green valley I had ever seen. It was the valley we left behind when we began our ascent. Down there the wind was making the leaves of the coffee trees glitter. I could see the coffee bean pickers, their yellow hats and croker sacks, and I could feel the beauty that was below me, and it never occurred to me that it was the beauty of death.