Viator

By the time Wilander regained his feet and staggered to the rail, Nygaard was down the rope and off into the forest. After the briefest of hesitations, he followed, furious at the little man for his transgression, for having befouled his woman, and he debated the truth of that as he went; he wondered if Nygaard might only be convicted of abusing a pet, but no, Wilander thought, catching sight of him heading over a rise (there you are, weaselly little shit), then passing out of sight…No, these were frontier circumstances, frontier laws must therefore apply. They hung horsethieves, sheepstealers, why not whistler-fuckers? He envisioned himself calling Nygaard to judgment—Nygaard would back away, stumble in the snow, put out his hands in defense, say something pitiable, and Wilander, looming above him, would say, I pronounce…I pronounce…Well, he would say something appropriate, something that would terrify Nygaard, that by its grandeur would infect him with dread, and then he would be on him with his fists flying, with kicks, goal-scoring kicks, delving in under the ribs, digging out his bones. As he floundered up the rise behind which Nygaard had vanished, a burst of light and noise, there came a shrieking and an accompanying flare of brightness that held and held, and he sank to his knees in the snow, stoppering his ears and squeezing his eyes shut. After an interminable time, the sound and light abated. He struggled to his feet and trudged to the top of the rise. Nygaard’s trail gave out in a patch of disturbed snow. Another burst of light and noise, farther away, off to his right, caused Wilander to grit his teeth. With Viator so near to leaving, the forest was full of stress points and Nygaard must have stumbled directly into one. He would have to be very careful; he did not want to pass through the barrier without the ship. Without her iron keel, the great stress-bearer to surround him, he had little chance of survival. Yet Aralyn, the qwazil and the wiccara, they had slipped through safely. He struggled with the idea, considering the notion of two-way travel, pro-and-conning, trying out the idea that passage one way was easier than passage the other, and, giving it up as too problematic, he began hiking back to the ship. It was tough going in the snow, the air turning to ice in his lungs, and as he paused to catch his breath, he was transfixed by the sight of Viator. The overcast had deepened, big snowflakes swirling down, and the ship, trapped between the two confining hills, looked to be straining forward, shouldering its burden of ice and snow, battered and indefatigable, every splotch, every dent, every evidence of its long labor, visible in that neutral light. He felt a unity with her, a shared principle, an inelegant workers’ purpose; they persevered, they hung in, they did their job. Tears came to his eyes on seeing his sister so resolute and undaunted. He glanced heavenward, less an emotional response than an involuntary attempt to clear his airway, and there, making a great soundless sweep across the lower sky was the creature of his dreams, the ropy wormlike thing, thrillingly vast, skimming the fir tops, clear for a split-second, a mile of gristle given definition by a central nub, leaving stillness in its wake. Wilander did not know what to do, dismasted by the sight. The firs had not bent beneath it, he had felt no great wind, so perhaps he had not seen it, perhaps he had fallen asleep in the snow and was dreaming. But the passage of the creature seemed a statement of finality. There was nothing left to do or say. He waited to be gathered, to wink out of existence, for some momentous event to occur. When it became clear that he was not to be taken, that this was not his time, only then did he collect the litter of self, the human stupidities, cram them back into his head, abandoning what would not fit, and went stumping through the snow toward Viator, not a thought in his head apart from that passage, that godlike passage, replaying it until the dark brown shadow it had cast became a dark brown cast of mind.

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