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
and, and when the Saint grabbed onto the demon’s arm, the demon pried up his fingers. A lot of people draw the Wandering Saint with two fingers of his right hand permanently bent up and away from the others, but that’s just grotesque,” said Umbo.
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.
“Umbo,” said Rigg. “I’m the demon.”
Umbo looked at him with a little anger showing. “That’s not even close to being funny.”