The Redemption of Althalus

She had one habit, though, that he really wished she’d get over. Every so often, Emerald seemed to develop an overpowering urge to bathe his face – usually when he was sound asleep. His eyes would suddenly pop open, and he’d realize that she had her paws firmly wrapped half-way around his head to hold him in place while she licked him from chin to forehead with her rough, wet tongue. He tried to jerk away from her the first few times, but as soon as he started to move, she’d flex her paws slightly, and her claws would come out. He got the point almost immediately. He didn’t really care for those impromptu baths, but he learned to endure them. There are always adjustments to be made when two creatures set up housekeeping together, and – aside from a few bad habits – Emerald wasn’t really all that hard to get along with.

Although the permanent night which blanketed the far north had taken away anything he could really call ‘day’, Althalus was fairly sure that the routine they followed probably coincided rather closely with the rising and setting of the sun farther to the south. He had no real reason for that belief and no way to verify it, but it seemed to him that it made more sense to think of it that way.

His ‘days’ were spent at the table with the Book open before him and with Emerald seated beside the Book, watching. Their conversations were largely limited to his pointing at an unfamiliar symbol and asking, ‘What’s this one mean?’ She would tell him, and he’d stumble along until he came to another unintelligible picture. The parchment sheets were loose inside the white leather box, and Emerald became very upset if he got them back in the wrong order. ‘It doesn’t make any sense if you mix them up like that,’ she’d scold him.

‘A lot of it doesn’t make sense anyway.’

‘Put them back the way you found them.’

‘All right, all right. Don’t tie your tail in a knot.’ That remark always seemed to trigger one of their little mock tussles. Emerald would lay her ears back, crouch low over her front paws and, with her bottom raised up and swinging back and forth ominously, her tail swished. Then she’d leap on his hand and mouth it. She’d never extend her claws and, though she growled terribly, she never actually bit him.

His best response to that was to take his other hand and thoroughly stir up her fur. She seemed to hate that, since it took her quite a while to comb everything back in place with her tongue.

Since Emerald was a cat – at least for right now – she had a keen sense of smell, and she insisted that Althalus should wash frequently – every time he turned around, it seemed. A large tiled tub filled with steaming water would quite suddenly appear near their bed, and after the first few times, Althalus would sigh, rise from his seat and begin removing his clothes. In the long run, he’d found, it was easier to bathe than it was to argue with her. As time went on, he even began to enjoy soaking in hot water before supper every day.

A peculiar notion came to him that winter, brought on perhaps by the continual darkness. He was still not entirely convinced that he wasn’t crazy, and, as insanity usually was, his had been brought on because he’d missed his time to die – just as the madness of the old man who’d talked to God had been. But maybe he hadn’t missed it after all. What if somewhere back in Hule, or maybe after he’d come up into the mountains of Kagwher, someone had slipped up behind him with an axe and chopped his head open, and he was dead? If it’d happened quickly enough, he wouldn’t have even realized it, so his ghost had just kept on walking. His body was probably lying somewhere with its brains dribbling out of its ears, but his ghost had continued on toward this House, totally unaware that he was really dead. It hadn’t been Althalus who’d encountered the crazy man who talked to God, and he hadn’t really reached the edge of the world and watched the fire of God. That was just something his ghost had thought up. Now his ghost had reached its final destination, and it would remain here in this closed room with Emerald and the Book forever. If his theory were correct, he’d crossed over into the afterlife. Everyone knows that the afterlife is filled with all sorts of strange things, so there was no point in getting excited about a room that stayed warm and comfortable and well-lighted without any trace of fire, and no real need to start bellowing, ‘impossible’ every time he turned around and something unusual happened. The whole business was just his own personal afterlife.

All things considered, though, this particular afterlife wasn’t so bad. He was warm and well-fed, and he had Emerald to talk to. He might have wished that there was some of Nabjor’s mead around someplace, or that some sister of the naughty-eyed girl in Nabjor’s camp might pay him a call now and then, but as time went on, those things became less and less important. He’d heard some pretty terrible stories about the afterlife, but if it didn’t get any worse than it was right now, Althalus felt that he could learn to be dead with it – he realized that ‘learn to live with it’ didn’t exactly fit in with his current situation. The one thing that nagged him was the total lack of any possibility of hunting down the man who’d killed him. Since he was now an insubstantial ghost, he wouldn’t be able to hack the rascal to pieces. But then he realized that he might just be able to haunt his unknown assailant, and that might be even more satisfying than butchering him.

He wondered if he might be able to persuade Emerald to agree to that. He could promise her that they could come back here to their private afterlife after he’d haunted his murderer to death, but he was almost positive that she wouldn’t put much store in promises made by the ghost of a man so famous for lying at every chance he got. After he’d thought his way through the idea, he decided that he wouldn’t mention the notion to his furry roommate.

Then the sun came back to the roof of the world, and the notion that he was dead began to fade. Eternal darkness sort of fit in with his concept of an afterlife, but the return of the sun made him almost feel that he’d been reborn.

He could read the Book fairly well by now, and he found it more and more interesting. One thing did sort of bother him, though. Late one spring afternoon, he laid his hand on the Book and glanced at Emerald, who appeared to be sleeping with her chin resting on her paws as she lay on the table beside the Book. ‘What’s his real name?’ he asked her.

Her green eyes were sleepy when she opened them. ‘Whose name?’ she asked.

‘The one who wrote the Book. He never comes right out and identifies himself.’

‘He’s God, Althalus.’

‘Yes, I know, but which one? Every land I’ve ever visited has its own god – or its own set of gods – and they all have different names. Was it Kherdhos – the god of the Wekti and Plakands? Or maybe Apwos, the god of Equero? What is his name?’

‘Deiwos, of course.’

‘Deiwos? The god of the Medyos?’

‘Of course.’

‘The Medyos are the silliest people in the world, Emerald.’

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘You’d think that the people who worshiped the real true God would have better sense.’

She sighed. ‘It’s all the same God, Althalus. Haven’t you realized that by now? The Wekti and Plakands call him Kherdhos because they’re interested in their herds of sheep or cows. The Equeros call him Apwos, because they concentrate most of their attention on the lakes. The Medyos are the oldest people in this part of the world, and they brought the name with them when they first came here.’

‘Where did they come from?’

‘Off to the south – after they learned how to herd sheep and plant grains. After they’d lived in Medyo for a while, they expanded out into those other places, and the people in the new places changed God’s name.’ She rose to her feet and stretched and yawned. ‘Let’s have fish for dinner tonight,’ she suggested.

‘We had fish last night – and the night before.’

‘So? I like fish, don’t you?’

‘Oh, fish is all right, I suppose, but I get a little tired of it after we’ve eaten it three times a day for three straight weeks.’

‘Fix your own supper,’ she flared.

‘You know perfectly well that I don’t know how to do that yet.’

‘Then you’ll just have to take whatever I put on the table, won’t you?’

He sighed. ‘Fish?’ he asked with a certain resignation.

‘What a wonderful idea, Althalus! I’m so glad you thought of it’

There were many concepts in the Book that Althalus couldn’t understand, and he and Emerald spent many contented evenings talking about them. They also spent quite a bit of time playing. Emerald was a cat, after all, and cats like to play. There was a kind of studied seriousness about her when she played that made her absolutely adorable, and she filled up most of the empty places in his life. Every so often she’d do something while she was playing that was so totally silly that it seemed almost human. Althalus thought about that, and he came to realize that only humans could be silly. Animals generally took themselves far too seriously to even suspect that they were being ridiculous.

Once, when he was concentrating very hard on the Book, he caught a slight movement out of the corner of his eye and realized that she was creeping up on him. He hadn’t really been paying much attention to her, and she’d only let that go on for just so long before she’d assert herself. She came creeping across the polished floor one furtive step at a time, but he knew that she was coming, so he was ready for her when she pounced, and half-turning, he caught her in mid-air with both hands. There was the usual mock tussle, and then he pulled her to his face and held her tightly against it. ‘Oh, I do love you, Emmy!’ he said.

She jerked her face back from his. ‘Emmy?’ she hissed. ‘EMMY!?!’

‘I’ve noticed that people do that,’ he tried to explain. ‘After they’ve been together for a while, they come up with pet names for each other.’

‘Put me down!’

‘Oh, don’t get all huffy.’

‘Emmy indeed! You put me down, or I’ll claw off one of your ears!’

He was fairly sure she wouldn’t, but he put her down and gave her a little pat on the head.

She turned sort of sideways, her fur bristling and her ears laid back. Then she hissed at him.

‘Why, Emmy,’ he said in mock surprise, ‘what a thing to say. I’m shocked at you. Shocked.’

Then she swore at him, and that really surprised him. ‘You’re actually angry, aren’t you?’

She hissed again, and he laughed at her. ‘Oh, Emmy, Emmy, Emmy,’ he said fondly.

‘Yes, Althie, Althie, Althie?’ she replied in a spiteful tone.

Althie?’

‘In your ear!’ she said. Then she went off to the bed to sulk.

He didn’t get any supper that night, but he sort of felt that it might have been worth it. He now had a way to respond when she started acting superior. One ‘Emmy’ would immediately erase the haughty look on her face and reduce her to near-inarticulate fury. Althalus carefully tucked that one up his sleeve for future use.

They declared peace on each other the next day, and life returned to normal. She fed him a near-banquet that evening. He understood that it was a peace-making gesture, so he complimented her after about every other bite.

Then, after they’d gone to bed, she washed his face for quite some time. ‘Did you really mean what you said yesterday?’ she purred.

‘Which particular thing I said were you thinking of?’ he asked.

Her ears went back immediately. ‘You said you loved me. Did you mean it?’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that. Of course I meant it. You shouldn’t even have to ask.’

‘Don’t you lie to me.’

‘Would I do that?’

‘Of course you would. You’re the greatest liar in the whole world.’

‘Why, thank you, dear.’

‘Don’t make me cross, Althalus,’ she warned. ‘I’ve got all four paws wrapped around your head right now, so be very nice to me – unless you’d like to have your face on the back of your head instead of the front.’

‘I’ll be good,’ he promised.

‘Say it again, then.’

‘Say what, dear?’

‘You know what!’

‘All right, little kitten, I love you. Does that make you feel better?’

She rubbed her face against his and started to purr.

The seasons turned, as seasons always do, although the summers were short and the winters long up here on the roof of the world, and after they’d gone around several times, the past seemed to recede until it was only a dim memory. In time, the days plodded by unnoticed as Althalus struggled with the Book. He began to spend more and more of his time staring up at the glowing dome overhead as he pondered the strange things the Book had revealed.

‘What is your problem?’ Emerald demanded irritably once when Althalus sat at the table with the Book lying almost unnoticed on the polished surface in front of him. ‘You’re not even pretending to be reading.’

Althalus laid his hand on the Book. ‘It just said something I don’t understand,’ he replied. ‘I’m trying to work it out.’

She sighed. ‘Tell me what it is,’ she said in a resigned tone. ‘I’ll explain it to you. You still won’t understand, but I’ll explain anyway’

‘You can be very offensive, did you know that?’

‘Of course. I’m doing it on purpose – but you still love me, don’t you?’

‘Oh – I guess so.’

‘You guess so?’

He laughed. ‘Woke you up, didn’t I?’

She laid back her ears and hissed at him.

‘Be nice,’ he said, putting out his hand and scratching her ears. Then he looked back at the troublesome line. ‘If I’m reading this right, it says that all the things Deiwos has made are of the same value in his eyes. Does that mean that a man isn’t any more important than a bug or a grain of sand?’

‘Not exactly,’ she replied. ‘What it really means is that Deiwos doesn’t think of the separate parts of what he’s made. It’s the whole thing that’s important. A man’s only a small part of the whole thing, and he’s not really here for very long. A man’s born, lives out his life, and dies in so short a time that the mountains and stars don’t even notice him as he goes by.’

‘That’s a gloomy thought. We don’t really mean anything, do we? Deiwos won’t even miss us after the last one of us dies, will he?’

‘Oh, he probably will. There were things that used to be alive, but they aren’t any more, and Deiwos still remembers them.’

‘Why did he let them die out, then?’

‘Because they’d done everything they were supposed to do. They’d completed what they’d been put here to attend to, so Deiwos let them go. Then too, if everything that had ever lived were still here, there wouldn’t be any room for new things.’

‘Sooner or later, that’ll happen to men as well, won’t it?’

‘That’s not entirely certain, Althalus. Other creatures take the world as they find it, but man changes things.’

‘And Deiwos guides us in those changes?’

‘Why would he do that? Deiwos doesn’t tinker, pet. He sets things in motion and then moves on. All the mistakes you make are entirely yours. Don’t blame Deiwos for them.’

Althalus reached out and ruffled her fur.

‘I wish you wouldn’t do that,’ she said. ‘It takes forever to get it all straight again.’

‘It gives you something to do between naps, Emmy,’ he told her, and then he went back to the Book.

CHAPTER SIX

The past receded even more in his memory as the Book claimed Althalus. By now he could read it through from end to end, and he’d done that so often that he could recite long passages from memory. The more it sank into his memory, the more it altered his perception of the world. Things that had seemed very important before he’d come here to the House at the End of the World were no longer relevant.

‘Was I really that small, Em?’ he asked his companion one evening in the early autumn of another of those interminable years.

‘What exactly are we talking about here, pet?’ she asked, absently washing her ears.

‘I was convinced that I was the greatest thief in the world, but along toward the end there, I wasn’t really much more than a common highwayman hitting people on the head so that I could steal their clothes.’

‘That comes fairly close, yes. What’s your point?’

‘I could have done more with my life, couldn’t I?’

‘That’s why we’re here, pet,’ she told him. ‘Whether you like it or not, you are going to do more with it. I’m going to see to that.’ She looked directly at him, her green eyes a mystery. ‘I think it’s time for you to learn how to use the power of the Book.’

‘What do you mean, “use”?’

‘You can make things happen with the Book. Where did you think your supper comes from every night?’

‘That’s your job, Em. It wouldn’t be polite for me to stick my nose into that area, would it?’

‘Polite or not, you are going to learn, Althalus. Certain words from the Book carry the sense of doing things – words like “chop” or “dig” or “cut”. You can do those things with the Book instead of with your back if you know how to use it. Right at first, you’ll need to be touching the Book when you do those things. After some practice, though, that won’t be necessary. The idea of the Book will serve the same purpose.’

‘The Book’s always going to be here, isn’t it?’

‘That’s the whole point, dear. The Book has to stay here. It wouldn’t be safe to take it out into the world, and you have things you have to do out there.’

‘Oh? What kind of things?’

‘Little things – saving the world, keeping the stars up in the sky where they belong, making sure that time keeps moving – things like that.’

‘Are you trying to be funny, Em?’

‘No, not really. We’ll get to those things later, though. Let’s try the easy ones first. Take off your shoe and throw it over by the bed. Then tell it to come back.’

‘I don’t think it’ll listen to me, Emmy.’

‘It will if you use the right word. All you have to do is put your hand on the Book, look at the shoe, and say “gwem”. It’s like calling a puppy’

‘That’s an awfully old-fashioned word, Emmy.’

‘Of course it is. It’s one of the first words. The language of the Book is the mother of your language. Your language grew out of it. Just try it, pet. We can talk about the changes of language some other time.’

He dubiously pulled off his shoe and tossed it over by the bed. Then he laid his hand on the Book and said ‘gwem’ rather half-heartedly.

Nothing happened.

‘So much for that as an idea,’ he muttered.

‘Command, Althie,’ Emerald said in a weary tone. ‘Do you think a puppy would listen if you said it that way?’

‘Gwem!’ he sharply commanded his shoe.

He didn’t really expect it, so he wasn’t ready to fend the shoe off, and it hit him squarely in the face.

‘It’s a good thing we didn’t start with your spear,’ Emmy noted. ‘It’s usually best to hold your hands out when you do that, Althalus. Let the shoe know where you want it to come to.’

‘It actually works!’ he exclaimed in astonishment.

‘Of course it does. Didn’t you believe me?’

‘Well – sort of, I guess. I didn’t think it’d happen quite that fast, though. I kind of expected the shoe to come slithering across the floor. I didn’t know it was going to fly.’

‘You said it just a little too firmly, pet. The tone of voice is very important when you do things this way. The louder and more sharply you say it, the faster it happens.’

‘I’ll remember that. Getting kicked in the face with my own shoe definitely got my attention. Why didn’t you warn me about that?’

‘Because you don’t listen, Althie. It’s just a waste of breath to warn you about things. Now try it again.’

Althalus put miles on that shoe over the next several weeks, and he gradually grew more proficient at altering the tone of his voice. He also discovered that different words would make the shoe do other things. ‘Dheu’ would make it rise up off the floor and simply stand in front of him on nothing but air. ‘Dhreu’ would lower it to the floor again.

He was practising on that one day in late summer when an impish kind of notion came to him. He looked over at Emerald, who was sitting on the bed carefully washing her ears. He focused his attention on her, set his hand on the Book, and said ‘Dheu.’

Emerald immediately rose up in the air until she was sitting on nothing at all at about the same level as his head. She continued to scrub at her ears as if nothing had happened. Then she looked at him, and her green eyes seemed very cold and hard. Then she said ‘Bhlag!’ quite sharply.

The blow took Althalus squarely on the point of the chin, and it sent him rolling across the floor. It seemed to have come out of nowhere at all, and it had rattled him all the way down to his toes.

‘We don’t do that to each other, do we?’ Emerald said in an almost pleasant tone of voice. ‘Now put me down.’

His eyes wouldn’t seem to focus. He covered one of them with his hand so that he could see her and said ‘Dhreu’ in an apologetic sort of way.

Emerald settled slowly back to the bed. ‘That’s much better,’ she said. ‘Are you going to get up, or did you plan to lie there on the floor for a while?’ Then she went back to washing her ears.

He more or less gathered at that point that there were rules and that it wasn’t wise to break them. He also realized that Emerald had just demonstrated the next step. She hadn’t been anywhere near the Book when she’d knocked him across the room.

He continued to practice with his shoe. He was more familiar with it than with his other possessions, and it didn’t have any sharp edges, as some of the others had. Just to see if he could do it, he’d put a pair of wings on it, and it went flapping around the room blundering into things. It occurred to him that a flying shoe would have been a sensation in Nabjor’s camp or Gosti Big Belly’s hall. That had been a long time ago, though. He idly roamed back through his memory, trying to attach some number to the years he’d spent here in the House, but the number kept evading him for some reason.

‘How long have I been here, Em?’ he asked his companion.

‘Quite some time. Why do you ask?’

‘Just curious, I suppose. I can barely remember a time when I wasn’t here.’

‘Time doesn’t really mean anything here in this House, pet. You’re here to learn, and some of the things in the Book are very difficult. It took your mind a very long time to fully grasp them. When we came to one of those, I’d usually let your eyes sleep while your mind worked. It was a lot quieter that way. Your arguments were with the Book, not with me.’

‘Let me see if I understand this. Are you saying that there’s been times when I went to sleep and didn’t wake up for a week or more?’

She gave him one of those infuriatingly superior looks.

‘A month?’ he asked incredulously.

‘Keep going,’ she suggested.

‘You’ve put me to sleep for years on end?’ he almost screamed at her.

‘Sleep’s very good for you, dear. The nice thing about those particular naps is that you don’t snore.’

‘How long, Emmy? How long have I been penned up in here with you?’

‘Long enough for us to get to know each other.’ Then she heaved one of those long-suffering sighs. ‘You must learn to listen when I tell you something, Althalus. You’ve been here in this House long enough to learn how to read the Book. That didn’t really take too long, though. It was learning to understand the Book that took you so much time. You haven’t quite finished that yet, but you’re coming along.’

‘That means that I’m very, very old, doesn’t it?’ He reached up, took hold of a lock of his hair and pulled it down so that he could see it. ‘I can’t be that old,’ he scoffed. ‘My hair hasn’t even turned white yet’

‘Why would it do that?’

‘I don’t know. It just does. When a man gets old, his hair turns white.’