“If this is an ‘event,’ it’s a very long one,” Peter said. “Does that mean it’s important?”
“Who’s to say? I remember some things from my childhood in complete, exquisite detail, and so far as I know, they don’t mean anything. Except to me, of course. And you, maybe. Someday I’ll tell you.” He smiled at me, teasingly, and I knew he did it just to cheer me. “Do you want to go after him?”
“Peter, I’m not sure we have enough to eat. Somehow I thought there’d be food in here. You know. Roots. Berries. I didn’t expect it all to be shadows and pictures.”
He shook his head at me, being practical as he sometimes was, most surprisingly. “It can’t be all shadows, Jinian. It’s substantial. The Maze is substantial. You can see things growing in it from outside. Some of it has to be real. Like your brain. If’ you could walk around inside your own brain, you might be able to see the ideas, but you’d still be walking on something real. Cells. Flesh. Something.” He reached out and stripped leaves and fruit from a thrilp bush beside the path, moodily waiting for it to dissolve.
And it didn’t. It lay there in his hand, dripping juice, smelling very ripe and real. I laughed. Couldn’t help it, I guess, he looked so discomfited. Mouth open. He had just told me some of it had to be real, but he hadn’t expected it to be the tree he was working at. My strained laughter made him laugh in turn, somewhat ruefully. He picked a hatful of thrilps, stowed them in his pack, and started after Queynt’s receding form, far in the northern distance.
“Don’t know about you, Jinian, but I’m going to see whether he told us the truth or not.”
I ran to catch up. It seemed an insane, completely random thing to do, unlikely to lead us anywhere helpful. And yet—I had done the guidance spell, Heart’s Blood, Road Dust, lead-me-where-it-would. There had been those ripe thrilps, almost like an answer to a prayer. And there had been grief in Lom’s mind, grief about something. Perhaps this road was not as unlikely as it seemed.
2
MEMORY
I have in recent years often reflected upon memory. One takes it so for granted. One remembers with such facile infallibility. And one finds with such shock—at least it was a shock to me—that memory isn’t truth.
This occurred to me first when I read Peter’s account of our meeting and the events around that time. The big things that happened were there, seen from a slightly different angle, perhaps, but intact. I remembered the Wind’s Eve and so did he. I remembered the Battle of the Bones, and in general he remembered it as I did. But many of the small things were totally different. I did not hear things he heard, even though we stood side by side when they were said. I did not see things he saw. And conversely, of course, I saw and heard things he did not. It struck me then, an interesting reflection without particular import, and I resolved in future not to be too insistent upon the truth of my own memories. I thought of the way Murzy had recalled old events. “I remember it this way,” she said. “I remember it this way, but on reflection, I think so and so must have happened, and even that may not be true.”
I thought of the subject again as we followed the memory of Vitior Vulpas Queynt into the Shadowmarches. It wasn’t very long since he had told us the story of that journey—what had it been? A handful of days, no more, since we had been cozy in the tower room at Bloome, listening to his reminiscences. And now we followed him upon that same journey as remembered by another mind, as remembered by the world that held him and that, for some reason, dignified this event with absolute clarity in every detail. The farther we went, the more convinced I was that we had come upon the right trail all unwittingly.
Peter kept experimenting as we went, testing which parts of our environment were real and which mere images. I gave him one clue to the nature of our surroundings when I told him somewhat impatiently to stop picking rainhat berries because I was stuffed.
“It’s been hours since I gave you the last one,” he complained. He had generously given me most of them, over my objections.
“It can’t have been,” I muttered. “I can still taste them. Really, Peter. It was only a moment ago.”
“No. It was when we crossed that last stream. All the way down this slope and through that forest at the foot of it. . . .”
It struck us both, simultaneously. Memory time, subjective time, might not be the same as “real” time, stomach time. I put a finger on my pulse and counted as we followed Queynt across several leagues of forest. A few hundred pulses, more or less, for a lengthy journey that should have taken thousands of heartbeats. Peter was counting his breaths. We shook our heads at each other in disbelief, but Peter did stop picking berries. “Space,” he muttered at me. “We’re probably not walking as far as we think we are.”
“It certainly hasn’t tired me any,” I admitted. “All of this is probably happening in quite a small place in the Maze.”
“One would think large memories would take larger spaces,” he objected, but he didn’t go on to say why. I thought privately that large memories might simply be more dense than others. Or perhaps they thin out with time. Probably a thousand years is no time at all for
