Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,312

the way down to the sea.

Brindle went on: “Some people, however, would have gone around the mountains instead of directly through them. I wonder if your ability to fly might have impaired your judgment as regards route finding.”

“There is a road,” Corvus pointed out. “We have been following it.”

“At its best—when it is traversing a well-drained meadow, for example—it is better described as a path or trail. At its more frequently seen worst, on the other hand—”

“It all connects up. I have followed it from one end of this Bit to the other.”

“There is also a road—a true road—that circumvents the mountains on their eastern flank. And the Bufrects have ships that could take us up the western coast. Oh, I’m not complaining, yet. As I said, we are Questing folk, and this feels quite a bit more Questlike than lounging on the deck of some boat. But if you don’t mind—”

“How many Quests have you performed?” Corvus asked.

Brindle sighed. “When I was a boy, I sailed across the First Shiver to the mainland, and rode with my father from our house to the ford of the river Thoss, a journey of several days. There I bade him farewell, never to see him again—though of course I did not know that at the time. Then I went home. There were wolves, and a scuffle with some rough characters.” He glanced in the direction of a heaving mound of skins and furs with a spear next to it. Somewhere under that was a rough character named Burr.

“And . . . ?”

“That is all.”

“No Quests for you, other than that?”

“That is correct.”

“So when you say, Brindle, that you are Questing folk—”

“I am saying that it is how we define ourselves. The tales we tell, the pictures we hang on the wall. But it has been a long time since any Calladon has taken part in a Quest worthy of being so called. This has weighed on my mind for many years. I am trying to tell you, Corvus, that I consented to place myself and my friends and family at hazard not so much because I find you convincing, but because the mere fact of going on a Quest is its own reward. And so cutting directly across the mountainous center of Calla, instead of scurrying around the edge, isn’t the worst thing in the world. But if you continue to make perverse choices in route finding, and we in consequence run out of food, or get hurt, questions will begin to be raised; and at that point I shall need to have a better answer than ‘Oh, going on Quests builds character’ and you shall have to have something better than strange talk about the fundamental nature of reality and how you fancy you were sent here from some other plane of existence that you cannot actually remember.”

“Well, the way we are taught it is this,” Prim was saying. It could be guessed from the looks on the others’ faces, and from subtleties about their posture, that some sort of disagreement had arisen while Brindle and Corvus had been up above. The glance that Prim now threw Brindle’s way as much as proved it. He had been enlisted on her side of a dispute he knew nothing of.

The topic seemed to be an old map that had been unrolled and spread flat to dry. They carried their maps in a tube that had got soaked by the rains, and several were scattered about. This particular one purported to show the entire Land. It had been painted, inked, embroidered, and gilded onto the skin of a large animal, and it had quite a lot to say. When she’d been younger, Prim had stared at it for hours. It appeared that one of the Bufrects had somewhat rashly ventured an opinion and that Prim was summoning all of her self-restraint to remain civil while setting him straight. Brindle, having arrived a little too late to finesse the situation, was helpless to do anything but stand by and nod as Prim launched into it, thus: “The Land was shaped long before El came into it, and it was shaped by Egdod. He started here, in what is now the middle, where El’s Palace now stands atop its pillar—perhaps this is why you are confused—and flew generally east.”

“Following the great river?”

“Creating it as he went, more like, until it had grown so wide that he felt it ought to empty into something. He marked that