the Wandering Saint first encountered his demon and gained the power to make it disappear. That’s how he’s able to do all these good things-he can command demons to disappear.”
“Can?” asked Rigg. “He’s still alive?”
Umbo laughed. “No, I don’t think so. I mean, not in the body. Did you know that there are people who said your dad was the Wandering Saint?”
“No,” said Rigg. “Nox said they called him ‘Wandering Man,’ sometimes, and she called him ‘Good Teacher,’ but nobody ever said ‘Saint.’”
“They used to whisper it all the time,” said Umbo. “Among other things. I guess they never talked like that in front of you.”
“Nobody ever mentioned the…” He let his voice trail off before he could say something annoying, like “Nobody ever mentioned the stupid Whimpering Saint at all.”
Instead of picking a quarrel, Rigg dutifully went to the first panel and saw at once that it was a depiction of the top of Stashi Falls, seen as if you were hovering in the air about three rods away from the face of the falls. A man was dangling from a single stone right at the lip of the falls, water spraying down (or so it seemed the painter wished to suggest) on both sides of him, while a fierce demon squatted on the stone and pried up on his fingers.
Then, still on the same picture of the falls but a little over to the right, there was the same man (by the costume anyway) dangling from the same rock, only instead of a demon there was a wad of something nondescript and the man now had two hands on the stone and was raising himself up.
“That was the miracle, see?” said Umbo. “You’ve really never heard of him? If you’re just lying to make me tell this story I’ll fart in your food, I swear it.”
“What miracle?”
“The demon knocked him off the falls and the Wandering Saint barely caught himself by one hand on a dry rock. Then the demon smashed at his hand, and when the Saint grabbed onto the demon’s arm, the demon pried up his fingers. A lot of people draw the Wandering Saint with two fingers of his right hand permanently bent up and away from the others, but that’s just grotesque,” said Umbo.
Rigg didn’t really care about the fingers. Couldn’t Umbo see that this was a picture of what happened yesterday on the cliff? But of course he couldn’t. Umbo had seen only his brother Kyokay. He had never seen the man that Rigg fought with to try to get through him so he could reach Kyokay’s hand to save him.
This is the man I fought. He was real-but he was from the past, and stayed in the past. He didn’t die after I lost sight of him. When time sped back up and I stopped prying his fingers, he must have thought a miracle happened. And when he climbed up onto the stone-he must have been so strong!-there would have been no sign of me.
Except there was something on the rock. “What’s this?” asked Rigg.
“Oh, that’s not supposed to be there. That’s really in the second story, but they just put it there to remind us of it so they could use the other panels for other tales. It’s a fur.”
“A fur?”
“When the Wandering Saint came down the Upsheer, he was cold and frightened, and he went to the great pool in the river where the cascade makes a mist, and caught among stones he found a fur, completely dressed out and ready for him to use it. It was from the demon, of course-the demon now recognized the Wandering Saint as a man of power, and so he gave him the fur as a tribute.”
I dropped my furs in this time, not in that man’s time, thought Rigg. But… maybe a fur got hung up on rocks for a brief while at the top of the falls, and maybe, just as time slowed down so I got shifted into the past where this man was, the last of my furs got swept right past the stone and…
He wanted to blurt out the truth to Umbo, but felt the long habit of silence about his abilities hold back his words. Father had forbidden him to tell anyone.
But Father had told Nox, hadn’t he? Because he trusted her.
Well, I trust Umbo. Or at least I want to. And if I’m traveling with him, how can I hide what I do with paths? Do I have to pretend that I don’t know where roads lead, or when someone is approaching, or where someone has laid an ambush? Maybe Umbo isn’t trustworthy. But if he is, this journey will be a lot better for not having to hide what I can do.
“Umbo,” said Rigg. “I’m the demon.”
Umbo looked at him with a little anger showing. “That’s not even close to being funny.”
“Come on, didn’t you say we used to play at being the W.S.?”
“The what?”
“The Wandering Saint.”
“How are we going to get the blessing if you ridicule this place, and him, and all he did for travelers?”
Now Rigg began to see why Father had warned him never to come up against a man’s religion. “Nothing makes people angrier than finding out somebody thinks they’re wrong about how the universe works.” It had been a mistake to try to tell Umbo anything. “Sorry,” said Rigg.
“No you’re not,” said Umbo. “You weren’t even joking. Do you really think that you’re a demon?”
“I’m thirteen years old, and I’m just ordinary.” Then Rigg walked out of the shrine, to show that he thought the discussion was over. If Umbo refused to drop the matter, then this idea of traveling together wasn’t going to work.
Umbo stayed inside the shrine for a while, then came out, acting a little huffish as he gathered up his few things. Clearly he was ready to go, and was marking time until he could say what he needed to say.
Rigg was about to tell him that it was all right, Umbo could go back home and Rigg would continue his journey alone. But Umbo spoke first. “You’re not ordinary.”
“Is that good or bad?” asked Rigg.
“I’m sorry I got so angry. I’ve just never-nobody ever says a bad thing about the Wandering Saint. And nobody calls him the ‘W.S.’”
Rigg wasn’t going to play this game-the apology that was really just a continuation of the argument.
“Believe what you want,” said Rigg.
“I was thinking I should leave you. Go back home before you bring down a curse on us.”
Oh, so the W.S. has the evil eye now, thought Rigg. But he didn’t say anything.
“I don’t know if it’s safe to travel with you if you’re going to mock him like that,” said Umbo, and he sounded afraid as well as angry. “But then I remembered how your father talked about saints and demons, back when he was teaching me… things. So you were only talking like your dad.”
Rigg remembered now that Father had taken Umbo out on walks in the woods or through the fields. Not recently, but when they were both about eight or nine. And Father was teaching him? “For what it’s worth, I wasn’t mocking,” said Rigg, “I was realizing something.”
“That you’re a demon?” said Umbo scornfully. “I know you’re not.”
“No, I realized that the demon in the Wandering Saint story wasn’t a demon at all,” said Rigg. “So I’m not a demon, but I’m the person who did the things that the demon in the story supposedly did-and before you start getting mad at me again, you watched me do it.”
“The Wandering Saint was hundreds of years ago,” said Umbo. He was barely containing his impatience.
“I’m not lying, and I’m not joking,” said Rigg. “When I was trying to save your brother, the reason I couldn’t do it was because this man appeared. I was jumping to try to get to your brother, and suddenly there he was.” There was no reason to complicate things by trying to explain about the paths and how for the first time ever they turned into people. “I fell into him and it knocked him into the water.”
“I didn’t see anything like that.”
“I know you didn’t,” said Rigg. “I’m not saying you saw him-he was in the past. I’m saying you saw me do the things the demon does in that story.”
“So he’s there hundreds of years ago, and you’re there a couple of days ago, and you bump into him and knock him into the water?”
“Exactly,” said Rigg, ignoring the tone of mockery in Umbo’s voice. “The water swept him over the edge, but he caught himself on the very same rock where Kyokay was hanging on. Kyokay in the present, and him in the past, and they overlapped. His hand was completely covering Kyokay’s hand.”
Umbo rolled his eyes and jammed his hat on his head, sausage and all.
