Normally when Leukos slunk off to go and write on his own Anthē and Zantheus would settle down to go to sleep for the night themselves, but on this night they stayed up talking by the light of the fire. For some reason, the riddle game had opened up something between them and they started to talk to one another as never before, no longer just as unlikely travelling companions, but as friends. Prompted by what she had learned about him during their time at the Academy, Anthē started to ask Zantheus about his childhood. For the first time, they began to tell and listen to each others’ stories.
Presently Anthē was filling in some of the gaps the Philosophers had not mentioned.
“So let me get this straight...” said Anthē. “You lived with this ‘Order’ your whole life then?”
“That is correct.”
“Did your parents belong to it too?”
“No. Normally the Government selects children based on certain...tests. Or they are volunteered by their parents. I was left at the entrance to the Sanctuary as a baby.”
“So you don’t remember your parents at all?”
“No. But that is normal for an Aythian knight.”
“Right. So, your ‘Order’, you believe that on top of this mountain—”
“Mount Awmeer.”
“Right. On top of this mountain you can find...?”
“Enlightenment.”
“That’s the word the Philosophers kept saying over and over.”
“Yes.”
“What does it mean?”
“Well... it is hard to explain...”
“Try. For me.”
“‘Article Twenty: Only he who becomes Enlightened can truly know what Enlightenment is. We must all strive for Enlightenment.’”
“But if you only know what it is once you’ve got it, how do you know what to look for?”
Zantheus paused ever so briefly before answering, “It is to be found on Mount Awmeer.”
“Well, there seemed to be a lot of disagreement about that...”
“No. Only amongst the Philosophers. They do not know the truth: Enlightenment is to be found on the summit of Mount Awmeer.”
Anthē wanted to dispute this, but she sensed there would not be much point. Instead she said, “So that explains why you’re always so desperate to get to this mountain. But I still don’t understand one thing.”
“What?”
“If it’s so important to you, how did you end up so far away from it?”
“If I were to tell you that, you would not believe me.”
“Try me,” said Anthē.
“No, you do not understand. I struggle to believe it myself.”
“So what?”
“Sometimes I wonder if I am not going mad...”
“Oh, there’s nothing odd about that,” Anthē reassured him. “We’re all a bit mad, after all, aren’t we? It won’t hurt anyone if you tell me.”
Slowly, without his even noticing, Zantheus yielded.
“If you insist... Well, as I told the Philosophers, the truth is that I have already climbed Mount Awmeer –once.”
“Right, I remember you said that. And you found...a mirror?”
“Yes. I know how it sounds, and I have been over it a thousand times in my mind, but at the top of the mountain I found a mirror. An enormous mirror. I could see myself in it. I do not know how it got there or if someone put it there, but it barred my way forward. I could not go round it, or push it over, or shatter it.”
“Right,” said Anthē. “But I still don’t see—”
“I am coming to that. I do not understand what happened to me next. I have never told anybody else this...”
“Tell me,” said Anthē, with genuine interest.
“I knelt down in front of the mirror, at a loss for what to do, and I think I said ‘How can I go further?’...”
“...and then?”
“Then...then I heard someone say ‘I’ll show you’. Someone was with me on the mountaintop.”
“Who?” asked Anthē excitedly. “Who was it?” she said again.
“I do not know.”
“Did you get a look at them?”
“No. Before I could do anything, they had taken hold of me and thrown me up into the sky. Whoever they were, they were impossibly strong.”
“Did the fall hurt you?”
“I...I am not sure. I lost consciousness.”
“And so then you woke up in a far-away land?”
“Yes, I...” Zantheus stopped. He thought had heard the faintest note of mockery in Anthē’s voice. “It does not matter.”
“No, no, carry on, I’m sorry Zantheus,” said Anthē. “I didn’t meant to joke. Please carry on. I’m listening.”
“When I woke up I was miles and miles away from Mount Awmeer, on a ship. I was on a ship and I had a great bruise on my head. The crew looked after me. That was where I met Tromo.”
They looked at Tromo. He was listening intently to their conversation as well. Anthē smiled at him. He smiled back.
“Ah, so that’s how you met Tromo. So, you must have reached Dahma eventually?”
“Yes, but we were attacked by pirates. In fact, Tromo saved my life.”
“What? How?”
“He swung into a man who was about to kill me.”
“Brave boy.” Anthē ruffled Tromo’s hair. His smile grew wider.
“Yes. But he fell overboard at the same time, so I dived him to save him in turn. We swam to shore, but it was a very long swim and I passed out when we got there. Then…”
“Go on.”
“Very well. Then I had the strangest dream, so vivid that it did not feel like a dream at all, and I remember it now as clearly as though it happened. I have a vivid memory of waking up in a vast hill country. Everywhere I looked, on all sides, were hills of grass, going on endlessly. There was no-one else there. They still haunt me in my dreams now.”
Anthē was intruiged. She felt like a child listening to a really good bedtime story. “What did you do, in the dream?”
“I...I started walking. I had nothing else to do... so I walked east for three days. Then...”
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“Keep going.”
“I am sorry. It sounds strange to say it out loud after all this time. Then I found a small house.”
“What was inside it?” Anthē asked, but somehow she felt as if she already knew what the answer was going to be.
“Him…” said Zantheus. He gestured towards Leukos, whom they could just about make out in the distance. “That boy. He was sitting down, writing of course. He asked me to help him move his desk and...there was a trapdoor underneath.” Zantheus gave up pausing to consider the ludicrousness of his story and carried on. “I opened it, and I saw the sky, and he kicked me into the sky. This time when I woke up I was on the shore, and there was Leukos, in the waking world. But he had refused to admit to knowing anything about the hills, or the sky, or the trapdoor, or to ever seeing me before. So I had to get on with things. I had lost Tromo, so we came to Ir to find him, and you know the rest.”
When he had finished telling her these things, there was silence.
“Curiouser and curiouser…” said Anthē, using a phrase she had heard learned from Kathegetes. “Well, that is certainly an interesting story,” said Anthē.
“I am glad that you think so,” said Zantheus, allowing himself the littlest measure of sarcasm.
But Anthē was not going to mock him. “No, Zantheus, I don’t believe you’re lying.”
“You must think that I am mad then.”
“A bit,” said Anthē. “But not as much as you think. In fact, dare I say it, something similar happened to me.”
“Really?” Zantheus could not mask his relief. It had been good to finally tell someone everything he had experienced. He felt...lighter.
“Yes,” said Anthē. “Do you remember the first time you met me at Keleb’s place?”
“Keleb’s place?”
“The brothel.”
“Yes. Leukos brought you over.”
“That’s it. The first time I met you and Leukos… That day, I had woken up in the morning after a very vivid dream. And Leukos was in it.”
“Really?”
“I’m not really sure how. Like you, I guess. But when I saw Leukos in the tent after a while I recognised him and realised that he had been in my dream that morning. Like for you, he denied it completely. I felt funny afterwards, and I tried not to think about it... But it definitely happened. It was only a dream but, like you, I can remember it all so vividly it’s as if it actually took place. It was a dream about a garden, the most beautiful garden in the world...”
“Like the one in the Academy?”
“Oh, even more beautiful. But then I... No, it doesn’t matter…”
It was Zantheus’s turn to encourage her. “Yes, it does.”
“But then in the dream I discovered that part of the garden was shut off to me, and another part of it had been damaged and destroyed. Leukos told me that I couldn’t get to the hidden part until I found the one other person I was meant to share it with, and that it was damaged because I’d let other people into it, but it could be repaired. For some reason it made me feel terribly sad. And later when I saw Leukos again in the tent, I remembered the sadness, and for some reason it made me feel sad again in turn about all the time I’d spent working in that horrible place. And I wanted...I wanted to leave. That was when Leukos told me about how you were travelling to Qereth together, and...it was like he was offering me a new start. So I took it.”
Zantheus pondered this. “And you say Leukos denied ever seeing you before?”
“Yes.”
“And the garden, you can still remember it as if it was real?”
“It certainly seems real. Sometimes I get these quick flashes of memory of it –and of course I see it in my dreams, though fainter. Sometimes I’m not sure if I actually went there or not...”
“Just like the hills...” muttered Zantheus.
“But that’s different. I mean, you said you spent three days there, right?”
“Certainly I remember spending three days there, yes, but whether or not any time passed there is another matter. I did not sleep, or eat, in the dream.”
“It’s all very strange,” she said, “how Leukos has been in both of our dreams, if that’s what they are, and denied it.” All three of them looked over at Leukos in the distance. They could just make out his quill, dancing over the page. Tromo seemed fidgety and preoccupied, but as usual he didn’t say anything.
Zantheus turned back to Anthē. “And what happened to you after that?”
“Then I met you of course. I thought you were an arrogant baboon at first. Still do.” The firelight lit up her wry smile for a moment. “And you threatened Keleb so I could get out. And then I went to look for Tromo with you.” She put her arm around Tromo. “I can’t believe you were considering leaving him to fend for himself!”
Her tone was not so much unbelieving any more as playful. “I am sorry, Tromo,” Zantheus said, for the first time ever. “Anthē quickly put me in my place.”
“And I’ll go on putting you in your place, it’s a lifetime job!” said Anthē.
Something happened to Zantheus’s mouth. He tried to stop it, but to no avail.
“Zantheus!” marvelled Anthē. “Is that a smile?”
“No.”
“Yes, it is! You’re smiling!” She laughed with Tromo. “He’s a big softy really, isn’t he, Tromo?” She composed herself. “And what about this little one? You’ve never told me his story, after all this time.”
Zantheus told it. “Ah, well. Like I said, I met Tromo on the ship that I woke up on after I had my experience on the mountain. He had been taken on as a cabin boy by the crew of the ship. The sailors said his parents were killed in a country called Shul. They were emissaries from Qereth to that land, I think. He may still have some family there, which is why I am taking him with me.”
“So that’s it. Well, I’ll suppose we’ll find out soon, won’t we sweetie?”
Tromo shrugged. He nestled a little closer into Anthē’s arm.
Anthē looked at Zantheus again.
“I’d always wondered how such a sweet little boy ended up with a lumbering oaf like you.”
Try as he might to stop it, Zantheus smiled again.
“Twice in one night!” said Anthē.
They looked at one another. Zantheus felt extremely privileged to be talking to this woman, here, now. He remembered seeing her in the dining hall of the Academy, as if for the first time, when he had felt the same way. The crackling light played across her hair, searching for her dark brown eyes. She really was quite beautiful. He held eye contact with her a bit longer than he should have, seeking her in that dark brown as she delved momentarily into his cool blue.
Then she disappeared with a scream. The fire went out as something smashed into Zantheus’s head. Colours swirled. He heard himself roaring with pain. With difficulty he stood up and drew his sword.
“—idiot!” someone was saying. “I told you to knock him out, Lestes!”
“I thought I did! That blow would have brought down a horse!”
“Damn it, we’ll have to kill him now.”
Zantheus was aware of two shapes in front of him. One of them launched itself at him with an angry cry. Unfortunately for the shapes, bashing him over the head had not had the effect of disabling of him so much as of disinhibiting him. He dispatched the first attacker by reflex, still rubbing his temple with his free hand, drawing and moving his sword across his unguarded posture to carve through his torso. Now he waited to see what the other one would do. His vision was coming back again. A skinny, crooked, weakling of a man, though one brandishing a long sword. When he saw what Zantheus had done to his associate, he turned tail and ran. Zantheus crashed into him, bringing him to the ground before he had gone two steps. He almost drove his blade into the back of the man’s neck, which would have killed him instantly, but stopped himself. Instead he wrested the man’s sword from him and flung it away. His ears still rang from the first blow, but he would not kill in cold blood. This man was more fortunate. Had he attacked Zantheus like his partner he may not have fared so well. Zantheus looked around. There were the remains of the fire, and their packs. Anthē and Tromo had gone. It was too dark to see in which direction they had left.
Zantheus came down to his new friend’s ear and said in a deep, menacing voice, “Where are my companions?”
All the man could say was “Please don’t kill me! Please don’t kill me!”
“I am not going to kill you,” said Zantheus. “Unless, of course, you do not tell me where my friends are,” he then added, gripped by concern for Anthē and Tromo. “Then I will kill you.”
A flow of words came out in stutters. “Th-they’ll be long gone by now, they’ll have r-reached the horses! We c-c-came on horseback! They were saddled c-close by! Please don’t kill me!”
“How many?” snarled Zantheus. His voice had taken on a new sinister, gravelly edge, but he did not realise this.
“F-four of us. Two of us on you, one each on the boy and the girl. But there’ll be m-more where they’ve gone.”
“Where have they gone?”
“I-I can’t tell you,” moaned the man.
“Where have they gone?” Zantheus’s voice was a wave of fury.
“They’ll kill me!” squealed the man.
“I will kill you if you do not tell me where they have gone! You can decide to die now, or later!”
The man was shaking violently. Zantheus pressed his blade to his neck to show him that he was not lying. He wondered if he was lying.
“No!” the man wailed. “I’ll tell you! I’ll tell you! They’ve gone back to the den! Our hideout!”
“How far away is it?”
“Maybe three hours’ walk? We came on h-horseback.”
“How many of you are there?”
“Twenty. No, thirty. Thirty or so.”
“All thieves like you?”
“Y-yes.”
Zantheus cursed. Why had they not been more careful? Leukos had even said that there were bandits roaming Sadeh. Leukos. Where was he?
“Leukos!” Zantheus called out in the darkness, enraged. “LEUKOOOOOS!”
The thief quivered violently underneath him, not knowing what was happening, hoping that Leukos was the name of a person.
It has happened again, thought Zantheus. That stupid boy. He had gone too. He had left them on their own again. He thought about what to do. Thirty robbers. Was he capable of fighting thirty men? Not all at the same time. He needed a plan. He turned his sword around and cracked the hilt into the side of the man’s head, rendering him unconscious, just as the bandits had tried to do to him.
He considered his plan.
Not once did the thought of continuing on without Anthē and Tromo cross his mind.