The Glass Mountains

by Cynthia Kadohata

  The following days fell into a rhythm of walking and resting, hunting and eating, drinking and beating sticks together. We’d left any remaining drums in camp, so we had only the sticks we found to play rhythms.

  We didn’t know whether the war still raged behind us, or whether Forma had taken over. We knew that, if war continued, those Bakshami that had remained in their villages had died. I thought about my brother and parents each night before I went to sleep, and sometimes if we had the energy Tarkahna and I played rhythms on sticks and prayed for our families. Prayer in Bakshami was aimed at the wisdom of the world. You could pray to the sky or to a rock or to the sand, for the wisdom resided everywhere, one had only to make oneself heard. So Tarkahna and I prayed to the noise our sticks made and tried to devise increasingly elaborate noises and rhythms in order to please the wisdom in our sticks.

  Every night I combed through Artie. Everyone else thought I spoiled him and that my spoiling would turn him bad, but I knew that wasn’t possible. He hauled more than any other dog, and he deserved to be treated with respect. The hair of some of the dogs had grown matted and infested, which amazed me; back in our village owners had taken great pride in their pets. Children were taught to groom first their dogs and then themselves before going to bed. I thought of what Cray had said about remembering our kindness and thought he would be disappointed.

  He would be disappointed, but he wouldn’t hold our behavior against us. It’s hard to express the fatigue we all felt. Every hour of every day we felt tired. We felt tired when we woke up and while we walked and while we took breaks. Even when I slept there was the feeling that the sleep wasn’t quite deep enough. In Bakshami the annual heavy rains could beat you down, while the dryness sucked the life out of you. We’d actually been hoping to encounter heavy rain, as we would have gotten at this time of year back in our village. Sometimes I even hoped for a life-threatening storm, because the monotony of each dry day seemed like a greater threat than a storm, no matter how big. I wanted to feel something again, to miss my parents and Maruk and Katinka. But I was too tired.

  Though nothing horrible happened, this part of the trip was in certain ways worse than the previous part. The tedium of walking overwhelmed us at times. I felt I wanted to bury my head in the sand and suffocate myself to escape the tedium. When, half-starving, we reached the second lake, we collapsed in it with the dogs. One man was so tired his head fell under the water and he didn’t bother to lift it. Jobei helped him lift himself.

  This lake was smaller by far than the last, and now there was no question of settling down. No one saw the point of staying. We found the discards of a previous group of campers—goods that probably had grown too heavy to carry. Mostly the previous group had left behind glass bottles, probably using furrto skins instead as water containers. Bakshami was a culture of glass: unbreakable glass, breakable glass, colored and clear glass, sand glass and rock glass and glass woven into threads. But during the last month when we’d been famished, we’d taken to chewing on our furrto skins. So the skins, in addition to being lighter than the bottles, doubled as food during a pinch. At the new lake we trapped furrtos for both food and new water containers.

  We’d started cutting our hair short and shaving the dogs to get rid of the fleas, but at the lake we let our hair grow again. One family announced the mother was pregnant. They started to build a dwelling, and another family began a dwelling of their own. But except for Ansmeea and a few especially weak children, our bodies had grown into the walking. We moved with less grace but greater strength than we once had. As exhausted as we were, we still held hopes for the future, and we knew there was no future at this little lake. It wasn’t large enough to support a village even a small portion of the size of my old town. So, eventually, forty-nine of us left.

  This time as we walked Jobei’s face thinned and grew gaunt. He retained his sweetness, but Leisha grew sullen and quiet. She didn’t care about mimicry or jokes anymore. Sometimes Jobei would try to perk her up by asking her to tell him jokes or by making up jokes to tell her. And Tarkahn’s previous constant talking had devolved into a nonsensical muttering that grew quieter and quieter until one day he moved his lips but no sound came out. I don’t know which day that happened—it happened so slowly the change had seemed almost natural, and I could scarcely imagine a time when he’d expressed himself with vigor.

  We gave Ansmeea an extra ration each day, but she continued to wither away until we didn’t understand how she stayed alive. Her brown hair had gotten bleached from the sun even through her hood, and her skin, which formerly held tinges of sky blue, turned pink like her mother’s had been, so that she looked less and less like a Bakshami. She no longer walked; Artie carried her on the sled every day.

  Now and then we’d come across skeletons, but most of them appeared old, from before the current troubles. There were a few, however, that appeared more recent. If there was no food we chewed on these bones for sustenance.

  Not long after the previous lake, we came across a camp that had been decimated much as ours had been. The ashes hadn’t yet been incorporated into the landscape, and a sickening sweet smell lingered. The thought that we could be killed even this far into our trip disillusioned all of us, and one man, who’d already lost his will, lost his life as well at that. He simply looked at that decimated camp and he lay down, the life gone from him.

  We didn’t even bother to play the rhythms. I lay awake until half-night staring into the sky and listening for the sound of humming. Once I looked around and saw the faces of my compatriots under the bright moons. All of them had eyes wide open as they stared into the sky and listened for the humming. I don’t know when the others fell asleep, but when I next woke the midday sun hung hot above camp. Usually, we woke before sunrise. Several other people still slept, and more appeared to have just arisen. After that we lost the meaning of what we did. That is, we no longer thought of the goal of reaching the hotlands, we just knew that every day we walked. Walking was what we did and walkers who we were. Except for Jobei, who retained his sweetness, we grew to have no other personality except our personality as walkers. When I opened my eyes I saw the sand on which I walked, and when I closed my eyes I saw myself walking on the sand. It grew too tiresome to hold my head up as I walked, so generally I watched the feet of the person in front of me.

  Time passed in this way. A baby was born, but he died. Otherwise nothing much changed. At every lake, one or two or more stayed behind so that finally only thirty of us remained. Surprisingly, Ansmeea survived. We felt no sense of triumph at our achievement. We were nothing more than insects.

  One of the lakes at which we’d expected to replenish our supplies turned out to be nothing more than a puddle, and we kept ourselves alive by drinking our own urine. We were trudging along in our zombielike way one day when Tarkahn suddenly exclaimed out loud, “Look, look!” It was the first time we’d heard his voice in months, so rather than look at what he pointed to with his finger we first looked at him, at his sunken face and twig of a finger. Then, across the flat expanse of sand, we saw a glimmering sliver like our silver moon Damos rising over the horizon in the evenings. It wasn’t Damos; it was the crest of Mount Artekka, the highest peak of the fabled Glass Mountains. I thought then that I’d never seen anything so intoxicating and beautiful as that sliver of shining hope, as that picture of our future rising over the horizon. And for the first time in months I felt emotion. I felt I loved Jobei and Leisha and all my fellow travelers; I wondered what had happened to my parents and Maruk and hoped I might hear news of them soon; and I remembered my home, and what a sanctuary it had been not only against the sun and heat but against all types of worry and cruelty as well.

  We fell to the sand and kissed it, thanking it for letting us get this far. We walked with new ardor for the next few days, our mood elevating as the mountains before us rose higher. The mountains reflected sunlight, and at times the heat neared the unbearable, even for people used to great heat. But we coul
dn’t be stopped now. Our supplies had run low and we’d cut rations by a third, yet our energy grew rather than diminished. During the day Tarkahn’s voice rose to a snappy mumble, and he began to talk in his sleep again.

  His talking heartened me on the one hand, because it showed his spirits were rising. On the other hand, his talking saddened me, because he talked about the recent past, and the recent past was gone. The recent past had not yet turned to dust and blown to the hotlands to become a part of the Glass Mountains. The world in which I had been raised was in limbo.

  2

  The Glass Mountains had always been and would always be. They contained everything and everybody that had ever existed in Bakshami, except whatever had been destroyed in the recent past. Here I myself would come to rest, after my bones had turned to dust.

  As we walked I could see nothing but glass around us, reflecting the heat until my blood seemed to boil inside me. The mountains weren’t smooth, except in places. They were ragged, occasionally like prisms, and they weren’t really glass but a type of quartz. Clouds of dust occasionally covered the sky above them.

  At night, however, the dust settled and the temperatures dropped. The stars shone all around. While in daytime I was surrounded by a thousand blazing reflections of the sun, at night a million reflections of the stars glimmered around me, and I knew the meaning of paradise.

  On the fifth night after Tarkahn had spotted Mount Artekka, we reached the Glass Mountains. The night was clear and the moons reflected endlessly off the surfaces of the mountains. We continued to walk at night, to try to get through while it was a little cooler. I felt amazed that any outsiders had successfully made this trip, but then I remembered that many had died on the way to the hotlands, and many others had traveled with entourages—servants and numerous dogs per person. Most had traveled from another direction.

  When we couldn’t go any farther we slept for a few hours and rose before sunrise to continue. It took several days to get through the mountains, and the only reason we made it was because without our knowing it our will had grown stronger during our long trek. Tarkahn was the first through, and from my place in the middle of the pack I could hear him talking, “There’s the village we’ve all heard so much about, it doesn’t look like much to me, I don’t know what the fuss is about, our village was bigger than that, but on the other hand I don’t know that I was ever as glad to see our village as I am to see this one; that is, I felt a deeper love for our village, but I can’t really say I felt excited every time I saw it; but in any case I do feel disappointed...”

  I, too, felt disappointed looking down the sweeping valley and seeing a village so far away it looked like a dollhouse, and an empty one, too, since no people walked the paths through town. I’d thought we were closer and that the village was larger. But when I first saw a person leaving a building my heart beat in my ears and I felt dizzy. I could see then that it was not a dollhouse spread before me but a real village, one where I might soon live, and one where I might soon hear news of my family. Mountains ringed the village, and two miraculous lakes shimmered. So far as I knew, this area was the most unlevel in Bakshami. I’d never seen lakes in a valley before. The effect inspired me and filled me with love for this village. Of course it wasn’t paradise by any means. Dust and sand swirled over the houses just as it did over all Bakshami, and the dwellings were modest even by the standards of my people.

  We kept walking, and as night began to fall we saw people come out to light lanterns in front of their houses, and more and more people began to walk outside, going from one building to another. We watched as crowds began to fill the paths. Someone said that those were not houses at all below, but saloons.

  “What’s a saloon?” said Jobei.

  “It’s a place where you’ll never go,” said an uncle sternly. But it turned out the uncle was mistaken, for a few days later, hungry, out of water, we walked thirty strong, with forty dogs, into the first door we came to. Though the sun blazed, when we passed through the door the inside was as dark as my house used to be at night when lit by candles. The saloon’s builders had added just a few windows, and heavy drapes of a type of fabric I’d never seen hung across what windows there were. Surprised by the drop in temperature and nervous to have arrived, I felt a slight but unusual chill. Only a few people sat at tables scattered about the large room. Hardly any of them looked Bakshami to me.

  “Can I help you?” said a man’s soft voice from the bar.

  “More villagers running from the Formans,” said a voice with disgust. “How many more are there to be? A man like me can take only so much.” The speaker was neither male nor female as far as I could see, and perhaps wasn’t even human. “What are you staring at?” he snapped at me.

  I stepped back and tripped over Artie, causing laughter throughout the room.

  “Hayseeds!” the speaker exclaimed.

  I’d never before heard the word he used but felt sure of its intent.

  “That one shivers as if she’s cold!”

  The man with the soft voice stepped into the path of some light coming through the drapes. He was a slight Bakshami man with his head shaved bald. “Lokahn processes the refugees. He’s at the biggest saloon, across town.”

  “How many more of us are there?” said my uncle.

  “Thousands, we don’t know what to do with them all.”

  “Where are they all then?”

  “Asleep. Why get out of bed at this hour?”

  “But it’s almost midday.”

  “Exactly my point.”

  “Well, what about the war?” said my uncle. “Give us some news, man.”

  “What about it? The Formans wiped out many villages. They’re trying to reach the hotlands through diplomatic channels. Their diplomats flatter the Soom Kali with new gifts and brilliant new compliments. But we’re safe here. The Soom Kali are too smart to want the Formans as neighbors.”

  “Hey, hayseed,” said the person who’d insulted me. “Take a bath and come back, I may need a servant.” Tarkahn mumbled, perhaps in reply.

  “What will happen?” said my uncle.

  “The Formans are marching through all of Bakshami, destroying villages until the elders give themselves up and come to Forma with their riches.”

  “Then this is about riches.”

  “It’s about a thousand years’ worth of accumulated riches, and about servants for the Formans.”

  “Bakshami should make good servants,” said the insulter. He pronounced it “backshammee” instead of “bahkshahmee.” “They’re hard workers and they don’t like a fight.”

  The man with the soft voice smiled at us. “Talk to Lokahn.”

  Tarkahn’s mumbling sounded insane, and he began wrinkling his nose, clearing his throat, twitching his eyebrows, and blowing out his cheeks as he talked. The insulting man looked at Tarkahn and shook his head sadly, as if there were just no hope for Bakshami.

  Before we left I turned to the man with the soft voice. “Excuse me, sir, why do you work here?”

  “Every generation of my family all through history has worked here. I’ve never been outside the hotlands. Where else should I work? I’m serving my sector here.” How provincial, I thought, until I realized that before the war I’d traveled little myself, and probably never would have moved from my village in my lifetime, just as my parents had never moved.

  We walked across to Lokahn’s, where a man groaned when he saw us and said, “What, more? Bevia! Bevia. More refugees.” He walked off mumbling, “Why must I be in charge of them?”

  Lokahn, like the soft-spoken man, didn’t act like any Bakshami I’d ever seen. For one thing, both of them had shaved their heads though neither were rebels. And when Lokahn’s wife appeared, she, too, had shaved her head. She swept brusquely into the room and because she looked forceful and solid, when she stood on a table her presence hushed us all. “Sit down and listen, we haven’t all day. Here’s the arrangement we’ve made. The elders will give you all the
jewels you can carry, and you can try to get out of Bakshami to resettle in another sector. If you wish to stay here, you must help dig wells. The elders claim there are great reserves of water if you dig deep enough, even here in the molten center of the planet. Oh, save us all from destruction, you’re covered in fleas! Get to the baths now, all of you, before you infest my saloon.” She pointed toward the back of the saloon, and we went through some doors to a hot spring, where we bathed with our dogs until our skin wrinkled and the water grew thick with fleas. The dirt and old skin fell off my body in chunks. In the drying-off room I saw my reflection for the first time since we’d left my village. My face, formerly round, now formed an oval, and my eyes, formerly gray-black, had turned pure black like Maruk’s. They were also dull from months of hunger and fatigue. My skin no longer shone as it once had, and my limbs were lean and muscular, like the limbs of Maruk’s wife had been. I was scarcely younger than Maruk had been when we left the village.

  After our baths Bevia started work in the saloon, and we wandered through the village. The village had come to life. Since the elders didn’t care if their patrons brought money or not, all manner of kings, politicians, robbers, and scum crowded the streets. The kings did bring jewels and money for the elders in case it bought better service, and the politicians pretended to have money or not, depending on how they perceived where the advantage lay. In the saloons, a robber might sit next to a king, and a moral man next to a woman who would slit your throat on a dare. All they shared was wanting advice from the elders. The elders never turned anyone away without giving them as many answers as they wanted to as many questions as they had. As a result some people got addicted to knowing all the trivia of their futures, staying for years asking ever more trifling questions.

  I even met one lady who’d once spoken to my grandfather Samarr years earlier.

  “Why don’t you leave?” I asked.

  “I have so many questions,” she said. “Sometimes I think there isn’t enough time to have them all answered.” She glanced up at the sun. “In fact, I have an appointment with an elder now.” She rushed away.