Quibble, 44. Vale

Lost in the Vale of Teeth, Quibble meets a wolf — and someone else.

44. Vale @Quibble

We walked in a cathedral of trees.

The gyrfalcon Chapter flew tree to tree, leading us in rather a meander. Where the trees parted, light dappled a mossy forest floor. Here and there, I spotted beds of mushrooms, the shaggy inkcaps the Dazed prized for making ink. Elsewhere, thickets of a creeping bush with switch-like branches and clusters of white flowers tripped me.

Witch-hobble, Meissa said. It’s invasive here.

She found something funny in this, but she wouldn’t say what.

We soon struck upon a stream bordered by a profusion of greenery, plants with three-fold, pinkish-white flowers. Meissa identified this as Pacific trillium, though she liked the name wakerobin better. A trail among the trillium paralleled the stream.

It looks man-made, I observed. This must be the way to the cabin.

No longer following Chapter’s lead, I turned Moth onto the trail. We scared up a colony of rabbits who fled helter-skelter away from us. After less than half a mile, the trail verged off to the left of the stream and began climbing uphill. I stopped to let Moth drink at the stream, downed the last of my water, and refilled the jug. The bread was all gone, and I was worried about food. How far did we have yet to go?

The stream was not far behind us when again I felt I was being watched. Espying revealed no gleaming shape, however. We pressed on. The trail wove between thickets of witch-hobble, still climbing. Just beyond a thicket, I saw a flicker of movement ahead, close to the ground. I stopped short and squinted, drawing it into focus. A lone wolf. It ambled out of the underbrush and onto the trail. It approached us cautiously.

Moth whinnied, stamped his feet, and pulled up sharp on his reins, eager to bolt, but I held him fast. I thought of popping into the saddle, but that close, the sound of the pop-out might alarm Moth, and then I’d be riding a doubly spooked horse. Skancing a suitably solid tree a few paces away, I stepped towards it, careful not to turn away from the wolf, and wrapped the horse’s reins around a branch.

It was just one wolf, probably no real threat to me if only I kept my wits. I called to mind what Quote had told me about how to deal with a wolf.

Don’t run! Don’t show it your back. Don’t look it in the eyes. Be submissive. Lower your head, look at the ground in front of the wolf. Make some noise, make sure it knows you’re there – yell at it. If it comes closer, get louder, throw sticks and stones. Wolves usually run away when it comes to that. If it attacks, ball up. Cover your head if you can. Protect your face and neck.

I shouted in mock threat: “Hey! Wolf! Hey there! Go away!”

The wolf arrested its stride a moment, then kept coming. Now it started to growl softly and bare its fangs. I looked around for sticks or stones to throw.

Never mind that! Meissa said nervously. Use the kindness, trance it.

My left hand wasn’t used to reaching into the cloak pocket, and I scrambled a bit to find its opening. Meanwhile, the wolf stepped closer and its growl grew louder, more forceful. When it was twelve feet away, I began to back up. Getting a grip on the glass, I withdrew it and held it straight out. Then I realized I didn’t know how to light it.

Grip it hard, Meissa said. Give it a thought.

My fingers clenched. What thought?

A good memory.

My mind strayed to last night’s dream, and Nish’s face rose before me. I saw her in our bedroom at the Adroit consensus, weeping. I pushed that troubling image away and thought instead of her lips on mine, her hands roving my skin, our lovemaking. The blue glass blinked, stuttering light, then shone out just as I tripped on witch-hobble. When I fell, I expected the wolf to leap onto me, but instead its eyes pivoted from me to the kindness. It stopped snarling, sat, and stared at the glass-dream.

The glass felt warm in my hand. Its dream was soothing. Embarrassment flooded me as I realized what I was showing the wolf – Meissa, too – but I didn’t dare let this dream end and try to produce another, lest the kindness die. I took my time getting to my feet, careful to keep the glass afire.

And now?

Approach the wolf.

What, just walk right up to it?!

Keep the glass lit and hold out your other hand to its nose. Let it sniff you.

My other hand: the one with the amber in it. If the wolf seized that hand, I might let go of the amber, and then I’d no longer be able to light the blue glass. But I took one hesitant step towards the wolf. It remained absorbed in dream.

Trusting Meissa knew her business, I approached the wolf. When I stood only a pace away, I held out my hand, using my thumb to hold the amber firmly in my palm. I kept my breaths even. In, out. Don’t hyperventilate. The wolf’s eyes stayed on the blue light radiating from my left hand. It snuffled vigorously at my right hand. Then, to my surprise, it licked me.

Somewhere ahead of me, a voice: “Why are you following us?”

I espied. Almost directly in front of me but some ways off, mostly hidden in the underbrush beside the trail, a figure crouched.

“I’m not!” I called back. “I’m looking for Glossary’s cabin.”

The crouching figure rose from the underbrush and stepped onto the trail. The face was thin, unmistakably male. He was shorter than I was – a rarity in my experience Without. I thought of Appendix, but this boy was not as gaunt. He was dressed in pale, loose-fitting elk skin, neatly stitched, bound by a leather thong for a belt. At one hip was sheathed a bone-handled knife, and at the other hung a cylinder of tree bark, some kind of basket. The boy didn’t look at me or skance me, but as a Dazed would, he spoke to an imaginary person standing beside me.

“You’re going the wrong way,” he said. “Glossary’s cabin is miles off, that way!” He waved a hand to my right. “He isn’t fond of visitors. What are you going there for?”

Unsure what was wise to say, I chose an evasion: “He’s a friend of a friend.”

“Quote? I thought you were him at first. Wasn’t Chapter with you?”

“Yes, but I don’t know where the fool is now. How did you know it was Chap?”

“I know birds!” the boy said. “Chap’s call is one of a kind.”

“Just now,” I said, growing impatient, “I’m more worried about the wolf than the bird. I’ve tranced it, and we seem to have made friends. Now what?”

The boy chuckled. “Let her go.”

I lingered a long moment, then relaxed my grip on the glass and let my memory of Nish fade. Waking from the glass-dream, the wolf leapt back from me, capered a bit as Grammar did at sight of his master, then rushed up and sniffed at my hand again.

“Clarity, come!” the boy called. “Here, girl!”

The wolf turned and trotted to the boy’s side. He knelt and buried his hands in the gray fur flecked with white and brown and blond. He let the wolf lick his face.

Meissa sounded as amazed as I was: A domesticated wolf?

“Forgive Clarity,” the boy said. “We’re a pair, she and I. She’s a sweetheart, but she’s protective of me. Not only are you going the wrong way, lady, but this trail leads into a den of wolves. If the wind was at your back, you’d be facing the whole pack right now. They have pups to protect.”

“Then what are you doing here? Won’t they attack you?”

“It’s Clarity’s pack, so it’s mine, too.”

“You live with wolves?”

“I’ve spent any amount of time with them.”

I was speechless.

“But we keep mostly to ourselves,” the boy went on, seeming to think the whole matter unremarkable. “Clarity can’t live on deer mice and rabbits alone. She hunts with the pack. A wolf’s a pretty hungry animal, you know.”

“What do you live on?” I said, shuddering to think of it.

“What I can find. What Clarity brings me.”

His hand planted in the fur of the wolf’s neck, the boy walked along the trail past me. He drew up short at the vine I’d tripped on and knelt. His hands caressed the vine and squeezed a bunch of bluish-purple berries to test their ripeness. He began plucking and eating them.

“I didn’t know you could eat witch-hobble berries,” I remarked.

Now the boy scoffed. “You don’t know much about wolves and glasses, either. What are you doing on your own in the Vale of Teeth?”

“The Vale of Teeth?!”

“Kindness, lady! Don’t you even know where you are?”

I let the boy’s derision pass. He plucked more berries and offered me a handful. Their taste was distinctive, like nothing else I’d ever eaten. The boy rose and, stepping with exaggerated care over the vine, strode on. “Come on!” he called over his shoulder.

Putting the kindness away, I unloosed Moth’s reins from the branch. The horse didn’t want to fall in behind the boy and wolf. Soothing him, I mounted and made my purpose clear with heels and reins.

How did we get into the Vale of Teeth? Meissa asked.

I don’t know! We came down the southeast side of the mountain.

How did you judge that?

I took my bearings from the sunrise.

Oh, Quibble, you could have consulted me! Meissa sounded exasperated. I’m a poor compass, I realize, but at least I know the seasons. Where do you think the sun rises and sets?

East and west, doesn’t it?

We’re in a northern latitude, far north in fact, and it’s ten days past the summer solstice. The sun rises in the northeast and sets in the northwest. I thought you knew that!

How would I? I’ve only been Without since the cool time.

Lacking a retort, Meissa sulked. By now, I knew her moods and how to handle them. To get her out of the sulk, I posed a question: Why do wolves respond to glasses?

A sigh. They have nanos, like Ones and Zeros do. Many large carnivores have them. It’s a sad history. The Ancient infected animals they believed were a threat to them. Really, they were the threat. There were too many Ancient. Tens of billions. The more they encroached on wildlife and damaged the ecosystems where they settled, the more pressure it put on animals to find food. Apex predators began to go for humans. Controlling glasses were the next step humans took to dominate them.

And you think that was a bad thing? I intuited from Meissa’s tone of disgust.

As a matter of fact, yes. It’s the hubris Utopia spoke of. We humans always have to be the masters. We don’t think we’re part of nature. The Ancient found the idea of reducing their own numbers offensive to their liberty and dignity. Any proposal to do it, however humane—

However modest? I broke in, recalling my reading of Swift. Who gets to decide what’s humane? Who decides for whom?

All right, Quibble, that’s fair. But like it or not, Earth has a carrying capacity. The planet can only support so many human beings. Beyond that point, drastic measures become inevitable. People can choose freely to do the right thing or end up with the intolerable forced on them. Look at it this way: controlling animals was the blueprint for controlling people. Do Ones get a say in how many children they bear? Or when they bear them? No, that’s all up to Unity.

I mulled over this. “Choosing freely to do the right thing” seemed a quandary of some sort: if there was only one right thing to do, where was the freedom in the choice? All of this was thousands of years removed from our current dilemma, however.

We were following a boy and a wolf through the Vale of Teeth. If I took the boy at his word, he’d spared us from a rendezvous with a pack of wolves. Now, as we again met the stream, presumably we weren’t heading towards some other danger. But could I know for sure? The boy acted like a Dazed, but I’d only ever heard of the hermit living on this side of the mountain. What of the Zero we’d espied at sunrise? Could the boy be in league with him? Leading us to him?

It was only implied he’s leading us to Glossary, Meissa pointed out.

I reined Moth in. The boy kept walking a few paces, then stopped, turned. Again, he didn’t look at me. He stared off into the forest across the stream. I got the impression he was not looking but listening. His alertness now reminded me not so much of any of the Dazed I knew – you couldn’t call them alert – but of how still I stood as One to learn which way I faced, to ascertain where I was in a chamber Within. One hears an echo. One learns to hear a difference. A new suspicion pounced on me.

“Are you coming or not?” the boy said. “If you need to know, we’re going to my house, and no, there aren’t more wolves there.”

“I thought you were taking me to Glossary.”

“Today? Too far! Clarity and I have our own things to do. You can wait a day. Or you can find your own way, but I don’t advise it! You don’t know where you’re going, that’s plain. Our wolf pack isn’t the only one in this vale.”

Enough evasion, I thought. Just be honest and get some answers.

“I’m running from Zeros, and I don’t know if I can trust you. I mean, I don’t even know who you are, and no offense, but you’re just a boy. How old are you?”

“Old enough to know my way around!”

“Maybe, but how old is that?”

“Twelve, lady! And my name is Nemo.”

The boy turned again and walked on, his arm draped over the wolf’s neck, as if giving only his age and his name settled the matter.

But indeed it did. Nemo, Latin for “nobody.” Verne’s tormented recluse, terrible avenger, perfect archangel of hatred. The mysterious pauper of Bleak House. The name Odysseus gave to the Cyclops. As literary as a name could get, it was no mystery to any Dazed who regularly spent time in a library, but it might fool next-to-illiterate Zeros. In spite of my skin and hair, the boy had taken for granted I was a Zero because I wielded a glass. He called me lady in spite of my gray cloak, the attire of a protégé.

Meissa gasped. The kindness never tranced him! And what does he call his pet wolf?

Clarity, not the boy, led the way. The boy was blind. He was Index.

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