“I think it was something scientific. Something astronomical. Something that scientists back then knew would happen, like planets lining up or some star in the sky blowing up or two stars crashing or something like that, only people who don’t know astronomy would never notice it.”
“Rigg,” said Father, “you’re so smart and so dumb at the same time that it almost takes my breath away.”
And that had been the end of that. Rigg knew Father knew something, and he also knew Father had no intention of telling him.
Maybe Nox would know what happened in Year Zero. Maybe Father told her all his secrets.
But to get to Nox, Rigg had to get down Upsheer to the village of Fall Ford. And to get down Upsheer, he had to reach Cliff Road, which was on the other side of the falls, and so he had to cross over the very place where the water ran fastest, the current strongest, and where he knew the boulders were being undermined and eaten away and it was quite possible that his step on one of the rocks would be the tipping point, and it would tumble over the falls and carry him down to his death.
And his consolation, all the way down, until the water or the rocks or just the force of landing pulverized him, would be that at least there’d be a big flood of water gushing out of the lake, so he wouldn’t die alone, the whole village of Fall Ford would be swept away in moments.
He remembered that this had been one of Father’s test questions. “Why would people build a village in a place where they know eventually there’ll be a terrible flood with no hope of survival and no warning in time to get away?”
“Because people forget,” Rigg answered Father.
“That’s right, Rigg. People forget. But you and I, Rigg-we don’t forget, do we?”
But Rigg knew that it wasn’t true. He couldn’t remember a lot of things.
He remembered the route across the rocks. But he didn’t trust that memory. He always checked it again when he got to the starting place, just above the surface of the lake.
It seemed so calm, but Rigg knew that if he dropped a stone it wouldn’t sink into the water, it would immediately be pushed toward the falls, moving as rapidly as if someone under the water had thrown it. If he dropped himself into the water, he, too, would be over the cliff in about two seconds-having been bashed into six or seven big rocks along the way, so that whatever fell down the waterfall would be a bloody bashed-up version of Rigg, probably in several pieces.
He stood and looked out over the water, seeing-feeling-the paths of countless travelers.
It wasn’t like a main road, which was so thick with paths that Rigg could only pick out an individual with great difficulty, and even then he would lose the path almost at once.
Here, there were only hundreds, not thousands or millions of paths.
And a disturbing number of them did not make it all the way across. They got to this spot or that, and then suddenly lurched toward the cliff face; they had to have been swept away by the water.
Then, of course, there were the ancient paths. This is why Rigg had been able to figure out about the erosion of the rock, the way the falls moved back and lower over time. Because Rigg could see paths that walked through the air, higher than the falls and fathoms outward. These paths jogged and lurched the way the current paths did, for the people who made those paths had been crossing on another set of rocks that penned in a higher, deeper lake.
And where the bridges used to be, thousands of ancient, fading paths sweeping smoothly through midair.
Of course the land had moved, the water had lowered. Someone who could see what Rigg could see was bound to figure out that the falls kept moving.
But today, here is where they were, and these rocks were the rocks that Rigg would have to cross.
He always chose a route that almost everyone had crossed safely; he always tried for a route that was well back from the edge.
Rigg remembered-or remembered Father telling him about it, which was as close to memory as didn’t matter-how Father had first discovered Rigg’s ability to find old paths, right here at the footcrossing of the water. Father had been about to leap, carrying little Rigg, from one stone to another, and Rigg shouted, “No!” He made Father take a different path because, as Father told him, “You said, ‘Nobody fell into the water this other way.’”
Rigg saw now the thing he saw then: Paths from stone to stone, different people, days or years or decades apart. He saw which of the paths of fallers were old and which were new. He chose a route that looked dry, that had been used most recently.
He saw his own past paths, of course.
And, of course, he saw no path at all belonging to Father.
What an odd thing for a son to be blind about-to see every person in the world, or at least to see the way they went, except his own father.
This time Rigg had to make doubly sure of his calculations, because he had to make the crossing with many pounds of bulky, unwieldy furs and hides bound on his back. A crossing he could make easily, carrying only a canteen and traps and a bit of food, would now require him to jump onto too small a rock; he would overbalance and fall in.
He was three leaps out, on a dry platform of rock a full two fathoms wide, when he caught a glimpse of movement and saw, on the far side of the water, a boy of about ten. He thought perhaps he knew him, but since Rigg only came to Fall Ford a few times a year, more or less, and didn’t always see everybody, it might be the younger brother of the boy he thought it was; or it might be a boy from another family entirely, or a complete stranger.
Rigg waved a greeting and the boy waved back.
Rigg made his next leap, and now he was on a much smaller rock, so there’d be no room to make a run. This was the trickiest place in his crossing, where he was most at risk of dying, and he thought that perhaps he should have let down his burden on the big rock he had just left, and crossed with only a third of the furs, and then gone back for the rest. He had never made this leap with such a burden-Father always carried more than half.
It wasn’t too late to go back to the big platform and divide his burden.
But then he saw that the boy had moved out onto a rock. It was much too close to the lip of the falls-Rigg knew that it was the beginning of a path that had the most deaths of any.
Rigg waved and gave a sign with both hands, as if he were pushing the boy back. “Go back!” he yelled. “Too dangerous!”
But the boy just waved, and made the push-back sign in return, which told Rigg that the boy hadn’t understood him. Obviously Rigg could not be heard above the roaring of the water as it swept among the rocks.
The boy leapt to the next rock, and now he was on a path that was pure peril. It would be hard for him to get back now, even if he tried. And the boy was apparently so stupid he was determined to go on.
Rigg had only a moment to decide. If he went back the way he had come, he could set down his burden and then take a dangerous path that would get him nearer to the boy, perhaps near enough to be heard, near enough to stop him. But it would take time to get the furs off his back, and he’d be farther from the boy while he did it.
So instead he simply made the leap he was already planning. He did it exactly right, and a moment later he was ready to leap for a slightly bigger rock. He made that leap, too.
He was only two stones from the boy.
The boy jumped one more time, and almost made it. But the water caught just a part of one foot and swept his leg toward the lip, and it threw the boy off balance and he whirled around and both his feet went into the water, and the water pulled savagely at him.
The boy wasn’t quite stupid after all. He knew he was doomed to lose the rock he was on, so he tried to catch at a smaller rock that was right at the lip of the falls.
He caught it, but the water whirled him around so that he hung by his fingers from the outward, dry edge of the rock and his body dangled over the vast drop to the river below.
“Hold on!” cried Rigg.
A whole winter’s trapping, and he was about to discard it in order to have a slim chance of saving the life of a boy so stupid that surely he deserved to die.
It took Rigg only a moment to get the thongs untied, so he could shrug the load of furs from his back into the
