Hugh Cook - The Wordsmiths and the Warguild

One, riding past Togura, suddenly cried out. With a certain amount of noise and cursing, the whole convoy reined in and halted. Togura smelt men, many days unwashed, and horses. Could they smell him? They would smell his fire! It was long dead, but there had been no rain to kill the lingering odours of ash and smoke. Togura, not daring to move, stared at the shroud-dark outline of the man who had called the convoy to a halt.

The man jumped down from his horse. His boots slurred over the ground. He was walking shuffle-foot, sliding his feet from step to step so he would get warning of a hole or a ditch. He found the remains of the fire, the cold ash mortuary, and kicked it apart. A scattering of ashes sifted through the night. Togura lay rigid, as silent as his bones.

The man spoke in his foreign language, then took another step forward. He trod on Togura's hair. Then, finding Togura's head with his boot, he kicked it experimentally. Then cried out aloud, for, concentrating on what was under his feet, he had walked into a spiked branch. Swearing to himself, he backed off.

From the head of the convoy came an imperative shout. Togura's unwitting assailant mounted up, and the convoy moved on. The last of the horses was dragging a bundle of some kind which scraped over the road. Togura guessed it was a sledge, possibly heavily loaded. He got to his hands and knees, momentarily considering pursuing the sledge and trying to scuffle off some equipment, then thought better of it.

The sky slowly lightened to sunrise. Togura hunted the bogland round about for his hobbled horse, and found it grazing by a lochan a hundred paces from the road. If it had neighed when the convoy had been passing, the men would probably have mounted a search for it. He had been fearfully lucky.

Togura was just about to lead the horse back to the road when he heard the sound of hoofbeats coming from the south. Leaving the horse down by the water's edge, he gained a small rise and watched the road. Four cavalrymen were riding north along the Salt Road at a steady trot.

As they went past, Togura came to a decision. He would abandon the road. He did not want to chance another meeting with soldiers who might celebrate his physical beauty – such as it was – by raping him, or who might kill him out of hand as a horse thief. Ignoring the road, which ran south, he would make for the south-east, and find his own path across the mountains.

Togura had a vague idea that Selzirk, the capital of the Harvest Plains, was somewhere to the south-east. He had made so much southing already that he was sure he must be nearly there; it was probably just over the mountains up ahead. Selzirk was said to be a civilised place; once there, he should be able to find his way to the port of Androlmarphos, and seek passage to Sung.

With such optimistic thoughts in mind, Togura set overland, making for the south-east. Unfortunately, his geography was faulty, to say the least. He had yet to realise the true size of the world. Having come so far, with so many dangers and hardships, he felt as if he had travelled almost to the end of eternity, whereas, in point of fact, he had scarcely left his local neighbourhood.

Selzirk was still far, far to the south, several horizons away. The range he was approaching was the Ironband Mountains; crossing it, he would find himself in the Lezconcarnau Plains, a wild tract of backwater country inhabited by wild backwater people.

Once, on his journey to the Ironband Mountains, Togura seriously considered crossing another range which he could see lying due east. Fortunately, he decided against such an adventure; that range was the Sping Mountains, and any crossing of them would have taken him into the hostile interior of the continent of Argan, where his survival would have been problematical.

When Togura began his climb, he soon found that it was going to be almost impossible to cross the mountains with a horse. Simultaneously, he exhausted his rations. That left him with two problems. With one masterstroke, he solved both of them; he murdered the horse. He ate some of the meat then and there, glutting himself on big, barbecued steaks with plenty of blood in them. He camped for five days, eating well; then, labouring uphill under the weight of a saddlebag crammed with smoked horse meat, he headed deeper into the mountains.

He looked forward, with some pleasure, to the thought of a warm bed and a warm ale once he reached the fabled city of Selzirk, pride of the Harvest Plains.

Faced by the daily challeges posed by this wilderness of mountains, Togura was not dismayed. He liked to climb; he had no fear of heights; he welcomed the difficulties posed by his chosen route, for every difficulty diminished the chance of an unpleasant encounter with other human beings.

The views afforded by altitude, which grew daily more extensive, were proof of his accomplishments. At the end of each day, with more and more of the world at his feet, he was abel to congratulate himself on an undeniable achievement. Having survived all kinds of terror, he was convinced that the worst was over. His living nightmares were over. He was free. He was full of confidence. He was happy.

He drank fresh, clear water from tumbling mountain streams. At night, he built huge, raging fires; roaring with exultant delight, he danced beside these shameless beacons, rousing distant echoes with raucous drinking songs. He had nothing to drink but water; it was unmitigated freedom which made him feel drunk.

He woke early, always filled with eagerness for the day ahead. Every day brought him new challenges, new delights. Wild mountain flowers, the like of which he had never seen before, as few flowers grew in Sung. Elegant rock crystals, some sunlight white, others delicately tinged with violet. The sight of mountain hawks and eagles, sliding effortlessly through the air as they haunted the echoing skies.

In bad weather, his journey could have been a dreary saga of suffering and torment. But chance favoured him. The sky, a perfect ascension of blue, breathed fair winds only; the sun, miraculous, constant luminary, lazed from the eastern quadrant of the sky to the west, bright as a promise of perfection.

Togura, shaking off a certain world-weariness which sometimes afflicts the very young, indulged himself, daring his life on difficult climbs when an easy ridge would have allowed him a more sober ascent, then – sometimes with a memory of rotten rock rattling away to disaster beneath him – celebrating his triumph with a shout:

"Three cheers for Togura!"

Far from the irrational conflicts of human affairs, he forgot all about the superstitious notions which had formerly begun to take possession of him. In the mountains, he trusted to his own balance, timing, judgment and strength. His universe yielded to his mastery. The nights, lit by his carefree fires, held no terror for him. He saw nothing which made him afraid, even though he once exchanged discourtesies with a wild-cat at close range.

Possessed by the unmitigated sanity of the mountains, Togura rapidly began to doubt the reality of many of his own memories. Had he really fought against his half-brother Cromarty, matching blade against blade? Had he really seen torture, death and revolution in a ruined city in the swamps of Sung? Had he really met a man in D'Wait who had the head and horns of a bull? He could not credit any of it.

Indeed, he thought all of human history increasingly improbable. Possessed by the perfection of his own health, joy and freedom, he could no longer believe in the incestuous rages, the narrow hatreds, the jealous lusts, the uncouth slanders and the muddy, scuffling wars which constituted the annals of human enterprise.

"I declare a Golden Age," said Togura, greeting yet another dew-bright sunrise. "We are born perfect to a perfect world, therefore perfection is our nature, truth and destiny."