“Why not wait to make up your mind until you hear me out?” said Rigg. “Even if you don’t believe me, I know it happened, and if you believe in saints and demons and curses, which I think are impossible, why not consider the possibility that I saw and touched a man from the past at the same time I was trying to get past the man so I could grab your brother’s arm?”
“‘Consider the possibility,’” Umbo echoed. “You really do sound like your father.”
“And was my father stupid or a liar, so that you have to reject anybody who sounds like him?”
Umbo’s face suddenly changed. “No,” he said. “Your father wasn’t stupid. Or a liar.” He looked thoughtful.
“So I had to get past this man’s hand so I could save Kyokay. I pounded on his hand. Then he grabs my other arm and I can see he’s going to pull me over-I mean, he outweighed me by about twice, it’s not like he could have held on to me and dragged himself up on the rock. So I pried up his fingers. Two fingers. So he’d let go of me.”
“I knew I saw you trying to pry up Kyokay’s hand!” said Umbo, angry again.
“You did not!” cried Rigg. “You saw me making a prying motion but you never saw me holding on to Kyokay’s fingers because I never touched him. I couldn’t! The W.S. was in the way! It was his fingers I was prying-fingers that you couldn’t see because he was still trapped back there in the past.”
“You just don’t know when to stop, do you,” said Umbo.
“I’m telling the truth,” said Rigg. “Believe what you want to.”
“The W.S.-the Wandering Saint was three hundred years ago!” Umbo shouted at him.
“Father warned me not to tell anybody anything about what I do,” said Rigg. “And now I see why. Go home. I’m done with you.”
“No!” shouted Umbo. “Don’t do this!”
Rigg forced himself to calm down. “I’m not doing anything,” he said. “I told you a true story, you think I’m lying, and I don’t see how we can travel together after that.”
“What you said about your father,” said Umbo. “Warning you not to tell people about what you do.”
“Right, well, I don’t do anything.”
“Yes you do, and you have to tell me.”
“I don’t tell things to people who believe I’m a liar,” said Rigg. “It’s a waste of breath.”
“I’ll listen, I swear I will,” said Umbo.
Rigg couldn’t understand why Umbo had suddenly changed-why he was now so eager to hear. But Umbo seemed sincere. Almost pleading.
He could almost hear Father saying, “You don’t have to answer someone just because he asks you a question.” And so Rigg replied as Father had taught him to-with another question. “Why do you want me to tell you?”
“Because maybe you’re not the only one with a secret your father said never to tell anybody,” said Umbo softly.
“So are you going to tell me yours?” asked Rigg.
“Yes,” said Umbo.
Rigg waited.
“You first,” said Umbo, even more softly. Like he was suddenly very shy. Like Rigg was dangerous and Umbo didn’t want to offend him.
But Father had known a secret of Umbo’s, one that he had never told to Rigg. So maybe that meant Father would approve of Rigg trusting Umbo.
“I see paths,” said Rigg. “I see them wherever any person or animal has ever gone. And that’s not really it, either. I don’t see them, not with my eyes, I just know where they are. They can be on the other side of a bunch of trees or behind a hill or inside the walls of a house, and I can close my eyes and the paths are still there.”
“Like… a map?”
“No. Like… streams of dust, strings of dust, cobwebs in the air. Some of them are new, and some old. Human paths are different from animal paths, and there are colors, or something like colors, depending on how old they are. But it means that I can see the whole history of a place, every path that a person has ever walked. I know it sounds crazy, or like magic, but Father said it had a perfectly rational explanation, only he would never tell me what such an explanation might be.”
Umbo’s eyes were wide, but he said nothing. No mockery now, no accusations.
“Up there at the top of Stashi falls, just as I was trying to get to your brother, everything changed. All of a sudden it was like the paths slowed down. I hadn’t ever realized they were moving, but when they slowed down I could see that the paths were not something the people left behind as they passed-they were the people, and I was seeing into the past. Only everything had always moved so fast that I didn’t realize it.”
“Everything slowed down,” said Umbo.
“Or my mind sped up,” said Rigg. “Either way, the paths became people doing the same motions, over and over. Except when I looked at one of them, concentrated on him-then he did it just the once. I figured he wasn’t real. Just a vision of the past, like the paths I see. I walk right through them all the time. So I lunged at the stone- and I hit him and knocked him off. He wasn’t a dream after all, he was solid and real. Solid enough that I could knock him down, pound his hand, pry up his fingers. I didn’t know how to get rid of him. And Kyokay died while I was trying.”
Umbo sank to the ground. “Do you know why time slowed down? Why the paths turned into people? Into the Wandering Saint?”
Rigg shook his head, but even though he didn’t have an explanation, Umbo seemed to believe him now.
“I did it,” Umbo said. “You might have saved Kyokay, except time slowed down and that’s why the Wandering Saint appeared.” His face twisted with anguish. “I couldn’t see him. How could I know that I was making him appear?”
Now Rigg understood why Umbo had started to believe him. Umbo’s secret, the one that Father had told him never to tell, was a strange gift of his own. “You had something to do with that slowing down of time.”
“Your father noticed me doing it,” said Umbo. “When I was little. That’s why he came to the shop so often. He talked to me about what I could do. It used to be I could only slow down time around myself-you know, when I wanted to keep playing for a while longer. I guess what I was really doing was slowing down time for everybody else, or speeding it up for me, but I was little, and what I saw was that everybody else started moving really slowly and I had time to do whatever I wanted to do. It could only last a few minutes, but your father knew what I was doing somehow, and he gave me exercises to do so I could learn how to control it. So I could slow time down exactly where I wanted it to slow, and nowhere else. When I was running up Cliff Road and I was out of breath and exhausted and I caught a glimpse of Kyokay falling, I… slowed him down. I mean, I practically stopped him.”
“Father never said anything about you,” said Rigg. “I mean, about you having a… thing like that.”
“He was a man who could keep a secret, wasn’t he?”
Like never mentioning that Rigg’s mother wasn’t even dead-yes, he could keep a secret all right.
“But this explains it,” said Rigg. “Why I don’t remember anything about this W.S. I mean, I don’t understand it, but it at least makes some kind of weird sense. I was the one who was in the story. Until you slowed time and I knocked the man off the rock, he probably never fell at all. But once it happened, then the past changed for everybody else. Now everybody knew the stories of the W.S.-except me. Because I was the one who was there with him, and I did it. So my past wasn’t changed. I don’t remember it, because to me it didn’t happen until yesterday.
“Excuse me while I stab myself in the eye with a stick,” said Umbo. “None of this makes any sense. I mean, I was there, too.”
“But you didn’t slow down time for yourself,” said Rigg. “You didn’t touch the man, and I did. Why else does this shrine exist to honor a man I never heard of, only you say everybody knows about the Wandering Saint and his story. But I remember doing everything the demon supposedly did. So because I was the one who made the change, I can still remember how it used to be, and everyone else remembers how it is now.”
“Rigg,” said Umbo, “I don’t know why I decided to ask you to let me travel with you. Talk about this all you want, but I did not need to find out that I caused Kyokay’s death by stopping time. Do you get that? That’s the only change I care about!”
“I know,” said Rigg. “Me too.” But as soon as he said it, he knew it wasn’t true. Somehow the combination of
