“Hold on!” cried Rigg.
A whole winter’s trapping, and he was about to discard it in order to have a slim chance of saving the life of a boy so stupid that surely he deserved to die.
It took Rigg only a moment to get the thongs untied, so he could shrug the load of furs from his back into the water.
He was so close to the lip now that the huge bundle caromed only once against the rocks as it hurtled toward the lip of the falls and then flew out into empty air and fell.
Meanwhile, Rigg dived for the rock that the boy had not quite made; Rigg made it, even though the boy had splashed water onto the surface and made it wet. “Hold on!” Rigg cried again. All he could see of the boy now was his fingers on the rock.
There wasn’t room on the rock for Rigg to jump for it; though it was very close, it was too likely that he would kick the boy’s fingers in the process of stepping there. So instead, Rigg knelt on his rock and then let himself topple forward, planning to catch the boy’s rock with his hands, making a bridge of his body.
Only something strange happened. Time nearly stopped.
Rigg had been in tense situations before. He knew what it was like when your perceptions became suddenly keener, when every second was more fully experienced. It felt at such times as though time held still. But it did not really happen that way. As Father explained it, there were glands in the human body that secreted a substance that gave greater strength and speed at times of stress.
This was not the same thing at all. As Rigg let himself fall forward, an operation that should have taken a second or less, it was suddenly as if he were sinking slowly i
nto something very thick. He had time to notice everything, and while he could not turn his eyes any faster than he could move any other part of his body, his attention could shift as rapidly as he wanted it to, so that anything within his field of vision, even at the edges, could be seen.
Then his attention was engaged by something far stranger. As time slowed down, so did the paths he saw in the air. They thickened. They became more solid.
They became people.
Every person who had tried to cross these rocks at this place became, first a blur of motion, then solid individuals, walking at their real pace. Whoever he concentrated on, he could see walking, jumping, leaping his or her course across the rocks. As soon as he focused his attention on someone else, the other people all became a streak of movement again.
So in mid-fall, he became aware of, concentrated on, a barelegged man who was standing right in the middle of the rock to which the young boy was clinging. The man’s back was to him; but because Rigg was falling so slowly, he had plenty of time to register that the man was dressed in a costume rather like those on the old fallen statues and crumbled friezes of the ruined buildings where the newer of the two old bridges had once rooted into the cliff.
Rigg realized that he was going to fall right into the man. But he couldn’t be solid, could he? This was just part of Rigg’s gift, weirdly changed in this moment of fear, and the paths were never tangible.
Yet this man looked so real—the hairs and pores on his calves, a raw place where something had scraped against his ankle, the frayed and half-opened hem of his kilt, the drooping band of embroidery only half-attached to it. Once the man had dressed in finery; now the finery had become rags.
Whatever ill-fortune had come upon the man, the fact remained that at this moment he was in Rigg’s way. Rigg thought: The people I’m not paying attention to become blurs of motion. If I turn my thoughts away from him, he, too, will become insubstantial.
So Rigg tried to focus on a woman who had tried to make the leap to this same rock, but had slipped and fallen immediately into the current and been swept over. He did this—and saw the horror on her face, flashing almost immediately to the death look of an animal that knows there is no escape. But then she was gone, and his attention returned at once to the man in front of him. If he had become insubstantial for a moment, he was solid enough now.
Rigg’s forehead smacked into the man’s calf; he felt the force of it, yet he was moving so slowly he could feel the texture of the man’s skin on his forehead and then, as Rigg’s head was compelled to turn, the abrasion of the hairs of his leg on Rigg’s face.
Just as Rigg’s face was forced to turn in order to slide down the man’s leg, so also the weight of Rigg’s head and shoulder striking the man caused his leg to buckle, and the man twisted, started to topple forward.
I came to save a boy and now I’m killing a man.
But this man was a soldier or athlete; he whipped around in mid-fall and reached out and clutched the rock, so that when he fell he dangled from both hands.
His left hand completely covered the right hand of the boy.
Apparently two solid objects could occupy the same space at the same time. Or, technically, not at the same time, because the man was actually here hundreds of years ago, but to Rigg it was the same moment. The man’s hand was solid. Rigg could feel it as his own hand, flung out by reflex to support himself after the collision with the man’s leg, slid across the rock and rammed into the fingers of the man’s right hand.
The result was that Rigg stopped sliding forward barely in time to keep his knees from sliding off the previous rock and into the water. Rigg’s body now made the bridge between rocks that he had planned to make. The man had, without meaning to, saved Rigg’s life.
But Rigg had not returned the favor. First he knocked him off his perch and toppled him over the side; and then Rigg’s hand, sliding across the rock, had jammed into the man’s fingers and shoved his right hand from the lip of the stone.
Now the man held on only by his left hand—the hand that completely covered the right hand of the dangling boy Rigg was here to save.
The man’s hand was not transparent in any way. It was real, thick, muscular, tanned, hairy, callused, spotted with freckles and ridged with veins. Yet at exactly the same time, Rigg could also see the taut, slender, nut-brown fingers of the boy, starting to slip just a little. Rigg knew he could help the boy, could hold him if he could only reach past his fingers and get ahold of his wrist. The boy was smaller than Rigg, and Rigg was very strong; if he could lock that wrist between his own fingers he could hang on to him long enough to get his other hand out for the boy to grab.
He could imagine it, plan it, and he could have done it except that he could not get past the thick wrist and forearm of the man.
You’re already dead, for decades and centuries you’re dead, so get out of the way and let me save this child!